“So what do you do?”
That question always stumps me. At various times in my life I have been: a writer, a designer, a researcher, a start-up founder, a corporate manager, an academic librarian, a grad school instructor, a grill cook, a student, a father, a husband, a dog owner, a mediocre banjo player, and a bunch of other things that don’t bear repeating in polite company. Call me what you will. But the best answer I’ve ever heard to that question came from one of my intellectual heroes, Buckminster Fuller:
“I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb.”
In strict resume terms, I have held roles at Google, Instagram, Etsy, The New York Times, and IBM, as well as at various design agencies and start-ups; and have consulted for clients including frog design, Adobe, Yahoo!, The New York Public Library, and the Internet Archive. In 2022 I completed my PhD in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, and have been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in Interaction Design. In my pre-Web life, I worked as a magazine writer and as an academic librarian at Harvard, where I briefly thought about becoming a rare books librarian. If you’d like to learn more about my checkered past, feel free to peruse my Linkedin profile.
Over the years I have also written some things. My most recent book Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. My first book Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages was republished in 2023 as a second edition by Cornell University Press (originally published in 2007 as Glut by National Academies Press) My writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon.com, Interactions, Communications of the ACM, and elsewhere.
I occasionally speak at industry conferences and events, such as the SxSW, O’Reilly, and Gartner Group conferences. If you’re interested in having me come speak to your group, feel free to contact me.
On the personal front, I live in Brooklyn with my wife, two sons, one dog, and three banjos.
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