My Books

Informatica
Cornell University Press
06/15/2023

The second edition of my first book Glut, this revised and expanded version continues the to explore the deep history of the information age. Today’s “information explosion” may seem like a modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation―or even the first species―to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of [...]

Regenerative UX
Carnegie Mellon School of Design
05/20/2022

My recently completed dissertation at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design explores the barriers that UX practitioners face in trying to incorporate long-term perspectives into their work. Drawing on more than 100 interviews and workshops with working practitioners, this research explores how UX practitioners might incorporate new methods drawn from the fields of alternative [...]

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
Oxford University Press
06/04/2014
The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.