Ethos

Art is the most intimate and free way I explore the questions and intuitions that keep resounding through my life, but my professional career in teaching and design has offered two others. 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 other beings 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. We 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. Ursula K. Le Guin once defined technology as “the active human interface with the material world,” which is to say, 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.

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, while a poorly-made one erodes those same capacities without anyone noticing.

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 uncertainty most of us actually live inside. I'm interested in tools and learning that build 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.