I make things.
I'm a multi-faceted creative professional. I have an unusually diverse range of interests and hobbies spanning technology, science, and the arts, but professionally I specialize in web design, web development, user interfaces, and interaction. I'm also a linguist-anthropologist, a musician and writer/journalist, and a general computer nerd.
You can download a pdf copy of my resume for your viewing pleasure. You can also browse through this site to read a few short essays on issues relating to the relationship between people and their technology, and learn more about me and my work.
technology is for people
I believe that the fundamental role of technology should be to serve the interests and needs of people. Regardless of how complex a society's technology is, from digging-sticks to smartphones, people shape the things around them to match their needs. In the desert a good digging-stick is probably more useful than your iPhone, but both of them are built around the same tactile principles to fit comfortably in the palm of Homo sapiens.
Nonetheless, user interfaces on digital technology tend to build around a certain set of culture-specific conceptual metaphors that don't necessarily always generalize well cross-culturally. Taken from a global perspective, human cultures and societies have an enormous variety of institutions, metaphors, and conventions that each group tends to take for granted. Many designers, engineers, and technologists are unaware of that, but it's one of the central insights of the social sciences. By being aware of the relationship between the technology we use and who we are as human beings, it's possible to design things, both virtual and material, that better suit our needs.