Practice
More than two decades of this work has run through service design, critical urbanism, digital public infrastructure, and the politics of technology. I pay attention to judgment, social trust, and the consequences that surface once a designed system is running at scale.
I have taught in Urban Technology at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning since 2024, as an Assistant Professor of Practice. I also work with a startup building infrastructure for AI, and run public programming through my studio, Thinking Weapons.
I spent 2017 to 2025 at 18F, the federal digital services agency, close to four of those years as Head of Design. The team I ran was the largest in-house group of human-centered designers in the federal government: more than 40 designers and design managers, with openings that drew upward of a thousand applicants each. I hired the government’s first in-house service designers and stood up the first service design unit anywhere in federal service, and I led strategic operations for the wider Technology Transformation Services organization. My other federal work included advising the Federal Trade Commission’s Chief of Staff and GSA’s Office of Customer Experience, and serving as Chief of Staff for a federal technology modernization unit.
I founded the Portland Digital Corps in March 2025. More than a hundred people signed up; fifty of them, designers, developers, strategists and data people, rebuilt six nonprofit websites on eight-week sprints, and the format has since been picked up elsewhere. I organized Design for the Public 24 with Technologists for Public Good, a two-day unconference that brought more than eighty people to Portland from across the country. As Board President of AIGA Portland I helped launch Portland Design Month.
My work has been presented at the Service Design Global Conference, at universities, and at other design and research venues, on consequence design, public mechanics, AI, civic trust, web governance, and the future of institutions.