Almost a year ago today, we–Alma Lopez-Moses and Liz Wert–founded ADITIONS. A WOC-led experience design studio based in San Francisco. ADITIONS was our answer to fostering new connections amongst communities, industries, individuals, and ultimately, cultures. Today, we are incredibly pleased to announce a milestone in our careers and introduce ourselves as the leaders of CANOA’s creative team.

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As we dive into our penned reflection below, we are thrilled to share why joining forces with CANOA makes perfect sense to us and what’s to come ahead. But before we get too far ahead into the future, it is important to the both of us to recap what was an incredibly memorable and life-changing past year and how ADITIONS will play an inherent role in our aims here at CANOA.

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For some context, ADITIONS, was our answer to reimagine connection through hybridized spatial experiences. Our strategies and designs have been realized in hospitality, retail and workplace projects, group exhibitions, and pop-up shops throughout the SF/Bay Area.

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But what overwhelmingly stands out to us in our time as its founders is the people we met that buoyed our practice and made our dream of starting a design studio a fulfilling journey and reality. (One of these individuals was Federico Negro, the founder of CANOA.)

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Ultimately, through ADITIONS we designed and cultivated an invaluable byproduct: A community. A community of like-minded designers, brands/companies, entrepreneurs, curators, and creatives who collaborated with us; explored with us; and inspired us.

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This has been our proudest achievement to date. And our reflection brings us to where we are today at CANOA––the new Head of Creative (Alma Lopez-Moses) and VP of Growth (Liz Wert) with our entire team alongside––as well as to a few thoughts we’d like to share below.

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Each individual within this aforementioned community shares common ground in a belief that we also share wholeheartedly with CANOA: Good design does good.

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As we see it, ‘good design’ has much more to do with creating an aesthetically pleasing space to spend an afternoon in. In its own personification, good design not only considers its end result (the user’s experience) but it accounts for the journey it took to get there. It takes stock of the many individuals who bring it to life, its local resources, materiality, environmental impact, the economics involved, and most of all, its legacy thereafter. Good design is empathetic.

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In joining CANOA we are simply arriving at another milestone in our lifelong exploration of this concept, continuing to learn and leverage new technologies to realize it, and most of all, realize it at scale.

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Our plans with CANOA are already in the making and involve exhibitions at San Francisco Design Week; a group exhibition set to investigate American design through a diversity of voices on the international stage of Milan Design Week at Alcova; as well as the launch of CANOA’s B2B design marketplace––a destination for our users to explore and utilize a bevy of independent, local design studios we admire.

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We look forward to keeping you updated on our plans and encourage you to follow along via CANOA’s Instagram /LinkedIn.

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Lastly, we encourage our fellow design community, suppliers, and current/future clients and collaborators to reach out to us as we continue to build a vibrant community with CANOA.

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-Alma + Liz