Throughout my work, I explore the relationship between design and democracy, and the role of participation and creativity in making other worlds possible.

I’m an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I teach design, theory, and methods courses and advise students in the Human-Centered Computing program and the Digital Media program. I draw upon design and ethnographic methods in my research, and much of my work is participatory and community-based. My background in the arts and humanities shapes my teaching, advising, and research.

Currently, I’m interested in several broad questions:

What is democracy after computing?
How do communities use data to achieve political ends, and how do their practices of data work prefigure new forms of civics?

How can design contribute to diverse economies?
How can we learn from and participate in a broader range of work and care practices?

What other worlds of design are possible? 
How can we cultivate more varied pedagogies and practices of design? How can we learn from art, craft, and activism? How can we describe, theorize, and work towards an expanded field of design?

Increasingly, I’m also interested in exploring what else computing might be, or “computing otherwise” (inspired by Helen Pritchard and Jennifer Gabrys). What I mean by this is exploring how we might broaden participation in computing in ways that challenge the narrow expectations of science and expertise that characterize much of computing as a discipline and profession.

I regularly publish in design, science and technology studies, and human-computer interaction journals and conference proceedings. My first book, Adversarial Design, is part of the Design Thinking, Design Theory series at MIT Press. My second book, Design as Democratic Inquiry was published last February, again on MIT Press. I’m also a co-editor of the MIT Press journal Design Issues. 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.