Resume

Helps organizations make high-stakes decisions under uncertainty by making futures tangible.

Senior cross-disciplinary leader with 20+ years of experience in strategic foresight, speculative prototyping, artifact-led strategy, emerging technology implications, new venture development, founding, teaching, and advisory work.

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Profile

I help organizations navigate ambiguity where technology, design, strategy, and culture intersect. My work has included founding and operating companies, building products, creating methods, writing books, teaching graduate students, leading seminars, and helping teams make future-facing decisions concrete enough to discuss and act on.

I am the author of The Manual of Design Fiction and It's Time to Imagine Harder, the founder of Near Future Laboratory, and the founder and former CEO of OMATA. My background spans electrical engineering, HCI engineering, doctoral work in technology and culture, advanced design, startup building, and public pedagogy.

Best Fit

Roles

Head of strategic foresight, emerging technology strategy, artifact-led strategy, principal advisory, fractional leadership, or senior roles that need cross-functional judgment before a commitment hardens.

Where Iā€™m most useful

Teams facing unclear consequences, emerging technology questions, product-strategy uncertainty, leadership misalignment, or a mandate that needs clearer options.

Selected Experience

Founder, Near Future Laboratory

2005 - present | Method creation, strategic practice, writing, advisory work

Built a long-running design and futures practice spanning client work, publishing, speaking, pedagogy, and method development, including the creation and application of design fiction as artifact-led decision support.

Work has included engagements with organizations such as Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, IKEA, Netflix, Warner Bros., the Dubai Future Foundation, Harvard GSD, MoMA, Roblox, Aspen Institute, the Design Museum in London, Princeton University, and multitudes of university and college programs.

Founder and CEO, OMATA

2014 - 2021 | Product, engineering, brand, fundraising, manufacturing, operations

Founded and led a hybrid analog-digital cycling computer company, taking the work from concept and product definition through execution across hardware, software, brand, and operations.

Responsibilities included concepting, prototyping, patent writing, app development, fundraising, manufacturing, logistics, marketing, customer care, and launch. The company was successfully sold in 2021.

Read the OMATA case study

Creative Technology Lead, Nokia Advanced Design

2008 - 2014 | Advanced design, prototyping, concept development, rapid manufacturing

Led and built future-facing product visions through concept development, material prototyping, rapid manufacturing, and embodied functional prototypes. Helped the team get much better at prototyping in-house and collaborated on product definitions, industrial design, and brand positioning.

Teaching and mentorship

USC School of Cinematic Arts and ongoing seminars | 2004 - present

Assistant Professor in the graduate Interactive Media program at USC and developed multiple seminar formats focused on interdisciplinary thinking, shared language, and futures-oriented judgment.

Earlier engineering, software, and mobile systems work

1990 - 2004 | HITLab, Organic Online, MTV/VH1, and related roles

Built early grounding across hardware engineering, virtual reality and HCI research, server engineering, software development, mobile and wireless systems, telephony applications, and digital product infrastructure.

Selected Public Work

Books and authorship

Author of The Manual of Design Fiction, It's Time to Imagine Harder, and the canonical essay on Design Fiction, A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction ā€” along with a sustained body of essays, newsletters, and artifacts focused on design, technology, and culture.

Talks, seminars, and executive sessions

Delivered talks, seminars, and sessions for institutions including USC, Harvard GSD, Royal College of Art, Dubai Futures Forum, AIGA, Google, Apple, Aspen Institute Italia, Chapman University, Atlassian, Cranbrook College, Henry Ford Museum, and many others.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz

Technology, culture, futures, design, and society

Doctoral work focused on the ways technological systems and forms of representation shape culture, social relations, and our understanding of reality.

Master of Science in Engineering, University of Washington

Human-computer interaction, interface design, computer science

Graduate engineering work at the University of Washington and the Human Interface Technology Lab, grounding later work in interface design, technical systems, and emerging media.

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Cornell University

Digital signal processing, computer science, computer architecture

Engineering foundation in hardware, signal processing, and computation that still informs the product and systems side of my practice.