What else is possible?
My work explores how design can help expand our collective sense of what’s possible—both through speculative projects that imagine alternatives, and by working alongside communities, organizations, and institutions as they do the practical, often messy work of bringing alternatives into being.
Recent Work
Supporting Alternative Food Networks
Atlanta is home to an extraordinary network of organizations working to address food insecurity. Some are governmental, others nonprofit, and a few are for-profit. Together, they rescue and redistribute hundreds of thousands of pounds of food each year.
One of the many challenges they face is logistical: How can diverse organizations and communities coordinate, share resources, and move food across a complex network? And how can we support this work without forcing these organizations into generic supply-chain infrastructures designed for very different purposes?
These are the questions we are exploring. We began with a participatory design process in the spring of 2026 and are now moving into prototyping. Our goal is to collaboratively craft alternative systems that are responsive to the values, practices, and relationships of Atlanta’s alternative food networks.
This project is ongoing and supported by an all-star team of designers: Vanshika Kumar, Morgan Brown, and Mandy Lin.
You Can’t Solve Democracy in Q3
A collaboration with Michael Madaio (Google Research) and Meg Young (Data & Society), this ongoing project explores the possibilities and limitations of efforts to democratize AI within industry. Drawing on multiple traditions in democratic political philosophy, we examine the different ways industry attempts understand and enact democratic participation. We consider what these initiatives make possible, where they fall short, and the tensions that emerge when democratic practices are brought into organizations whose structures and incentives are not themselves democratic. The project ultimately asks how democratic governance of AI might move beyond consultation and legitimacy-building toward more substantive forms of participation, accountability, and shared power in the development and deployment of AI systems.
Published at the 2026 FaCCT Conference.
Image Source: Wikimedia
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Tables
Tables is a participatory workshop where creatives can express their hopes and concerns about AI. The first iteration of the workshop took place in April 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia. The premise is simple: invite creatives to come together to explore their use, non-use, and mis-use of AI through conversation, reflection, and making. From that, craft a manifesto of “commitments” that express a set of conditions for how these creatives want to engage AI in their practices. After the workshop, these commitments are documented and shared through a custom printed poster.
The Tables project is led by Catherine Wieczorek-Berkes, with partnership from the Fulton County Public Art Futures Lab .
Under the Circumstances
Under The Circumstances began as a book project with ken anderson. It’s a place for us to think in public together: essays, conversations, field notes, and unfinished ideas about the complications of our contemporary conditions. We tell a lot of stories, and many of them are uncomfortably familiar: public meetings where the important question cannot be asked within the rules of the meeting; participatory processes designed to absorb dissent without changing outcomes; projects that succeed according to every metric and still make things worse. We’re interested in figuring out what to do inside these conditions. The compromises we’re willing to make. The lines we refuse to cross. The small practices through which we try to build livable worlds inside damaged systems.