I explore how people come together to build, contest, and transform the social, civic, and technological worlds they inhabit.
I do this 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.
A few things I’m currently trying to understand :
How might we design institutions, technologies, and public processes that deepen democratic participation in everyday life?
How do we create meaningful change from within systems we no longer believe in?
How can we cultivate creativity and imagination in ways that genuinely expand collective possibility, rather than reducing them to tools of productivity, innovation, or individual advantage?
I'm fascinated by "alternatives" and “adjacencies”: how people develop unconventional ways of living together. These can take many forms, from community land trusts to mutual aid networks to data commons to worker cooperatives. What matters to me is how these alternatives and adjacencies expand our repertoires of what feels possible.
I bring almost three decades of experience to this work. I've published books, written articles, exhibited internationally, worked in agencies and studios, collaborated with industry, government and communities, spoken to diverse audiences, served on the boards of non-profits, and foraged fruit in a few cities.
I welcome collaborations. If you have a project in mind, please contact me.
For a bit more formal bio (but not too formal)…
Currently, I’m a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2024 through 2026, I was a visiting Professor at Princeton University, where I helped develop a novel Design program. 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.