Ethos
There's a small constellation of questions and intuitions that keep resounding throughout my life, and I've explored them through my artistic practice as well as through my professional career in teaching and design. Across all of them, I'm asking: how do we cultivate the tools, senses, and sensibilities to navigate the dynamic, the uncertain, and the unknowable? What information already surrounds us that has fallen from our attention? What practices restore a generative relationship with the places, objects, and world around us?
Another technology is possible
I've noticed that most people's dislike for and distrust of "technology" has nothing to do with technology itself but rather with the particular political-economic frame that currently contains it: extraction, ownership, scale at all costs, capture, a privileging of the global and universal over the specific and local. These aren't the same thing. Ursula K. Le Guin once defined technology as "the active human interface with the material world:" a relationship, not a category of thing.
I love the philosophy of permacomputing for exactly this reason: it names a set of practices for making with computers that assume finitude, locality, and care for what already exists, rather than perpetual growth. What I'd add is that these principles don't circumscribe only the ecological; they're relational. The same disposition that treats silicon and energy as resources to optimize tends to treat human attention that way too. Attention and care propose a corrective methodology.
The secret life of objects
In an age where we live with digital algorithms that surpass our immediate comprehension, perhaps we are rediscovering something ancient: we have always been shaped by our interaction with the world. Objects embody memory and time. That which exists can become a kind of strange attractor or center of gravity for other entities with which it shares an environment.
I've made objects that make invisible data visible, operating as a kind of material algorithm, fixing ephemeral moments into permanent forms. Other objects seek to communicate a sense of presence. Whether breath, magnets, snails, or light, I'm fascinated by alternative forms of intelligence and creativity. An object does not need a nervous system or consciousness to participate in generative systems, even to be necessary and fundamental participants in those processes.
Tools teach
Every object and every interface is also a pedagogy. This is why I move fluidly between designing things and designing learning: they are the same act at different time-scales. A well-made tool cultivates certain sensibilities in the people who use it. We often talk about technology in terms of tools, and tools at their best are also guides and gateways to learning journeys. But it also needs to be said: products are not the same as tools. In the service of simplicity and reproducibility, contemporary technology products have a bias towards eroding those same capacities.
Human-centered design, as an inherited framework, is good at optimizing for what people already know they want. It is much worse at preparing people for what they cannot yet imagine, or for the genuine complexity and uncertainty that we actually live within. I'm interested in building the second kind of capacity.
Complex systems all the way down
What phenomenology unites cities, traffic, sandpiles, LLMs, societies, the human brain, a forest, large power grids?
I'll meet you there.