Kate
Kate leads our art + design work, develops and programs video game content, and is the all-around primary experimenter.
Her professional background is taking raw objects, spaces, and ideas, and making them better. Over her career, Kate has assessed AI and robotics technologies; reviewed restaurants and hotels; designed assets and done voiceover work for infectious control tracking software; helped run international hackathons; built an Arduino game controller out of a 2×4, made tonnes of print and digital content look pretty and work well; and continues to do a mashup of other activities that don’t usually appear in the same run-on sentence.
Kate has spearheaded a maker’s dozen of new ventures for Maker’s Dozen, from eco-conscious greeting cards, participating in local artisan markets and shops, designing and producing maker kits, running workshops, writing articles, giving talks and leading walks. You can usually find her trying out a new craft, following animal tracks in the woods, or otherwise happily juggling eleventy-one projects at once.
Neil
Neil’s professional background is in computer programming, specializing in creative industries like games, computer animation, and technology start-ups. He draws on over 20 years experience building software and tools that make digital creativity real.
Neil’s steady and methodical nature and appetite for learning help Maker’s Dozen tackle new and exciting projects. He designed our timber-framed chicken coop, is our resident chicken nurse, and makes a pretty good fermented pickle.
When he’s not behind his computer, you can find Neil planting trees, checking on our animals, honing one of his non-digital crafts (painting, pizza-making, woodworking, music…), and being a sounding board for Kate’s experiments. He has the bushy red beard of a lumberjack, the heart of an artist, and a brain for wrangling bits and bytes.