What else is possible?
I'm interested in the worlds people build beside, within, and beyond existing institutions.
Another world doesn't begin as an abstract idea; it takes shape through the everyday work of people experimenting with new ways of living, governing, organizing, and creating together. I'm interested in how design can help expand our collective sense of what is possible—not only through speculative projects that imagine alternatives, but also and at the same time, by working alongside communities, organizations, and institutions as they do the practical, often messy work of bringing those alternatives into being.
Current Projects
Another world needs another design practice.
The design we inherited was built for a particular world. It helped create products, markets, and industries, and it continues to shape how we imagine what design is for. But other worlds demand other design practices. I'm interested in how designers are reimagining their discipline, and in what design can learn from people who have long been making institutions and communities without ever claiming the title of designer: organizers, craftspeople, educators, and public servants. This is as much a project of learning as it is of critique: gathering ideas from many traditions and putting them to work through research, teaching, workshops, and collaborative practice.
Doing meaningful work inside systems & institutions we no longer believe in.
How can we think clearly, act deliberately, and remain accountable under conditions where reform is insufficient and complicity is inevitable?
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.
Not solutions, exactly. But bearings.