GIANT Spotlight: Meet Alex!

Tell us a bit about yourself… Hi, I’m Alex Briñas. I was born and raised in NY, and one of my biggest dreams is to build my own tiny home and mini farm one day. In the meantime, I share a studio with many many plants and even some composting worms.

I studied Product Design at Stanford and have a deep care for innovative education.

What topics are you excited to teach about? I am excited to teach about design-sorts of things (design-thinking, logo design, graphic design), doodling and sketching, origami and paper crafting, ukulele-ing...honestly, there are a lot of topics I’m excited about!

Design is not only about how things look like - it’s about truly understanding your user’s points of view, their pain points, and their desires, and then creating something that makes their life a little bit better. Design is more about deep empathy than mere beauty and that’s what I hope my students take away from my classes.

What is your favorite thing to do in New York City? My favorite thing to do in NYC is scout out new ice cream spots (summer, winter, it doesn’t matter - every season is ice cream season).

Favorite projects you’ve worked on… I’ve had the chance to work on a variety of projects so far, including co-creating and crowdfunding a drawing toolkit for kids, designing print and packaging for an organic tea company, and helping create a makerspace and an LGBTQ+ support group at a high school in Japan.

What is something you want to learn, or are learning right now? I’m trying to teach myself how to hand embroider, pick up some motion design skills, and I also want to better understand how design can help build a more equitable society.

Website:  https://www.alexbrinas.info/

Example Projects: