Hi, I'm Charlie 👋

I'm a product designer based in Montréal and co-founder of Pragmatics Studio. I am fascinated by informal learning, speculative technology, and how the stories we tell ourselves can limit or expand our own futures. I exercise these passions in my practice as a designer, in my lectures and workshops as an educator, and in my ideas as a writer.

I'm a lecture and assist with the curriculum of Concordia University's UX Certificate. In the past I taught Creativity, Innovation, and Critical Thinking for engineering graduate students.

Previously, I worked at startups that provided me with room to explore experimental interactions in fields like social media, education, and automation. At Waverly, I was designing tools to help people build content recommendation algorithms using natural language processing. At Ground News, I relaunched their full web platform to combat media bias, resulting in 4x growth. At Wrk Technologies, I set up the design system that took into account over 1,000 different actions for their human-in-the-loop robotic process automation system.

In 2012, I helped found District 3, one of Canada's largest university incubators. When I returned in 2018, I developed a student residency program which enables students to learn hands-on and launch impactful projects. Under my supervision, the program resulted in a variety of successful projects including BOLO, the breakthrough police community engagement program that was rolled out across Canada.

Education

In 2016, I completed the Interaction Design Program at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction design. My projects have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Zagreb, Warsaw, and on the official Arduino blog.

In 2014, I got my undergraduate degree in Marketing at Concordia University. Though I ended up in design, the case competition training and exposure to business concepts continues to influence my work to this day. It was there that I discovered my love for startups and became a founding member of District 3 in 2012.