McKinley Smith

is a designer, artist, and speculative builder working at the intersection of industrial design, space futures, and material experimentation. Currently completing a Master of Design at the University of Washington, McKinley’s research explores lunar habitation, in-situ resource utilization, and the cultural implications of extraterrestrial industry.

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Raised in aircraft hangars and flight lines, McKinley grew up around experimental airframes and systems testing through his father, a test pilot and Space Shuttle astronaut candidate. Early exposure to aerospace engineering—where risk, precision, and imagination coexist—shaped a lifelong preoccupation with how machines carry human ambition. That foundation continues to inform a practice that treats space not as abstraction, but as a material and political condition.

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As the founder of TERRAMOTO and Kitbash Studio, McKinley operates between critical design inquiry and hands-on fabrication—developing full-scale prototypes, experimental objects, interactive installations, and mechanical systems that merge poetic speculation with engineering rigor. Their work spans CNC fabrication, embedded electronics, ceramic experimentation with regolith analogs, UI/UX systems design, and custom mechanical builds, often translating aerospace logics into human-scale artifacts.

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Drawing from fine art, industrial design, and engineering culture, McKinley’s work positions technology not as spectacle but as substance—something to be shaped, questioned, and made culturally legible. Through objects, systems, and speculative narratives, they examine how innovation concentrates power, how infrastructure shapes possibility, and how design can mediate between extraction, imagination, and care—on Earth and beyond.