Hi,

I'm a scholar, educator, & designer based in Atlanta.

Throughout my work, I study and design for the ways people build the social, civic, and technological worlds they aspire to.

I approach this work in multiple ways. I conduct research; both scholarly work that advances ideas and debates in academia, and applied studies that inform practice and policy. I teach in formal and informal settings, and I design and facilitate workshops and seminars. I also collaborate with partners to build practical interventions, such as digital maps for community-based organizations or scenarios for government and industry practitioners.

The two questions I’m constantly asking are:
“How can we design institutions, technologies, and processes that deepen democratic participation in all areas of our lives?”
“How can we expand our creative capacity to shape the systems we inhabit?”

I'm fascinated by "alternatives": how people develop unconventional ways of living together. These alternatives can take many forms, from community land trusts to mutual aid networks to data commons. I study how these alternatives are designed, maintained, and contested. What matters to me is how these alternatives expand the repertoire of what feels possible in public life.

I bring almost three decades of experience to this work. I've published a couple of books, written articles, exhibited internationally, worked in agencies and studios, collaborated with industry and government, spoken to diverse audiences, served on the boards of non-profits, and foraged fruit in a few cities. 

I'm always open to collaboration. If you have a project you'd like to work on together or a question you'd like to explore together, please reach out.

For a bit more formal bio (but not too formal)…

Currently, I’m a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and, from 2024 through 2026, I’m a visiting Professor at Princeton University. In the past, I also had the privilege of being a visiting professor at the Umeå Institute of Design.

As an academic, I regularly publish in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. I’m the author of two books on design and democracy, Adversarial Design and Design as Democratic Inquiry, both published by MIT Press. I’m also a co-editor of the MIT Press journal Design Issues. In 2025 I was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy for my contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and that year I was also awarded the STS Infrastructure Award from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, for my work as a co-editor of the DigitalSTS Handbook.

My design and media art has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM (Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe), Grey Area Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco), Times Square Arts Alliance, Science Gallery Dublin, and the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis). For a while, I was part of the tactical media collective Carbon Defense League.

I earned a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. From 2006 – 2007 I was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society. I earned a B.F.A in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, in the great cities of Minneapolis & St. Paul. In between those degrees, I worked as a designer for about a decade, including formative time with the Walker Art Center and at MetaDesign.