I learned how to program fortran in 7th grade with punch cards at Northwestern, built my first hovercraft in 8th grade (a use for old vacuum cleaners and shower curtains!), broke both my arms learning that I didn’t really understand mechanical engineering while falling off of my home made 8’ unicycle in high school, stumbled on becoming a mad scientist and inventor at the school of art and architecture at the University of Illinois in Chicago and have never looked back.
I’m an industrial/product designer by training, an irrepressible maker of many things and have grown to embrace and become a lifelong student of comprehensive anticipatory design science, system thinking, collective action, and the broader field of augmented collective intelligence.
I co-authored Trillions, Living in the Information Ecology, and co-founded a Human-Centered Design educational institute called LUMA Institute, while working at a wonderful and deeply inspiring interdisciplinary design/strategy lab that spun out of Carnegie Mellon University back in 1989. It was named after a quote from Raymond Loewy. “If you could find the Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable fit between people and technology you had found the MAYA zone.”
As a fellow and resident artist at Autodesk Research and a founding member of their Strategic Foresights group I helped explore generative AI/design authoring tools back in 2014-2019 that might become collaborative members of hybrid human/machine teams and how agent-based algorithms might be applied to the design of complex products, environments, and personalized lifelong learning engines.
As a senior advisor at BCG I have had a very small part in helping co-create their Department of Strategic Surprise (DeepTech) offering in an effort to shape the business, policy, and social realities involved in transitioning humanity towards a net-positive embrace of the rarest experiment—of the Universe evolving life that can see and know itself—that we’ve been able to find in our galaxy.
I’m particularly focused on how biology might reverse the ravages of the industrial revolution (as an industrial designer I feel particularly culpable from my profession and past creations), regeneratively shift our food supply chains to virtuous and just food webs, and the ways that biology can be applied to the built world.