I'm a critical urbanist and design executive building resilience into how we deploy systems and software for the public at large. I speak globally on service design & delivery at tech and design events.

What if the present could be as good as we imagine the future we want? That's essentially the crux of my stack of practitioner and scholarly interests.

These days, I'm focused on branching past the "civic tech" of the web 2.0 world towards something closer to public mechanics: the work of closing the latency between written policy and on-the-ground deployment, identifying where human judgment actually lives inside delivery, and naming the consequences that travel the last documented mile from institution to person. With AI proliferating, agentic decision rights need to be formalized, codified, and actually enforced, so I've spent most of 2026 working on primitives and strategy to better improve how we're deploying consequential technology in the contexts of daily and urban life.

Currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in the University of Michigan's Urban Technology program. I founded the Portland Digital Corps all-volunteer cohort, after serving as head of design in the US General Services Administration's 18F unit, building platforms, systems, and digital services for millions of Americans.

Reading — books past & present →