About
A cross-disciplinary practice for giving shape to unfamiliar possibilities.
I’ve spent most of my career moving between engineering, research, design, art, startup building, teaching, and writing. The through-line is pretty simple: I like helping people get hold of things that are emerging, half-formed, or hard to name.
Current Focus
Right now that broader practice is taking especially concrete form in two areas: AI policy and governance work focused on institutional uptake and consequence, and a book project about organizational imagination as an operating capability.
AI Policy & Governance
Current work in AI policy and governance is centered on the point where AI systems move into institutions, workflows, delegated authority, and public life. I am focusing on evocative, artifact-led approaches to make the issues legible and concrete enough to engage publics, and refresh perspectives from professional policy communities.
The emphasis is on making trust problems, governance gaps, and real-world consequences legible before they normalize, using workshops, seminars, and artifacts to make policy questions concrete enough to inspect and debate.
Going Over Backwards
An in-progress book about building organizational imagination as a practical institutional capability rather than a vague cultural aspiration. This is the next in the series that started with the 2009 design fiction essay, the 2022 Manual of Design Fiction (‘What’), and the 2023 It's Time To Imagine Harder (’Why’). It makes the case for speculative prototyping as a way to build organizational imagination in a way that fits how teams actually work (‘How’).
It makes the case that speculative prototyping helps organizations perceive, host, test, and act on unfamiliar possibilities before they fit the existing language of the institution.
My formal training spans electrical engineering, human-computer interaction, and history of consciousness. I taught in the graduate Interactive Media program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, worked within Nokia’s Advanced Design practice, founded Near Future Laboratory, and later founded OMATA, where I developed a hybrid analog-digital cycling computer company through product, engineering, brand, and operations.
OMATA matters here because it is founder-operator proof, not just an interesting project: I took a point of view, turned it into a physical product and a company, and carried it across product, engineering, brand, fundraising, and execution.
Across those contexts, I kept returning to the same practical question: how do you give new ideas enough form and narrative weight that other people can see them clearly, understand what they imply, and decide with conviction?
That question led to design fiction, to workshops and seminars, to artifact-led strategy work, and now to a sharper interest in speculative prototyping as a standing organizational capability.
What this adds up to in practical terms is senior-level utility: I can help an organization name a problem earlier, frame it better, prototype it faster, and create the shared language needed to move from possibility to decision.
Education
Cornell University (BSEE), University of Washington (MSEng), UC Santa Cruz (PhD)
Founding / leadership
Near Future Laboratory, OMATA, Nokia Advanced Design
Teaching
Assistant Professor USC School of Cinematic Arts, commissioned seminars, keynotes, workshops, professional mentorship
Where I’m most useful
Leadership roles, principal advisory work, capability building, selective collaborations