I’m a designer, developer, and educator based in San Francisco. For about 26 years I’ve been making things for the web; for the last eight I’ve been building programs and organizations where young people can become more fully themselves.
I don’t separate those two. When I started designing websites at thirteen, it was obvious that I also needed to learn to code them. I didn’t want to be a painter who couldn’t mix his paints, or stretch his canvas. My entire career has continued that approach, whether designing a book, crafting a class, or building an organization. I don’t believe you can design a program for human becoming without also building the things that make it real: the website, the curriculum, the brand, the document that tells a mentor how to show up. The conceiving and the making are one act.
Most of my work lives at that seam. I run the School of Other Fields, a creative mentorship program for Bay Area teenagers, and help lead Problem Library, the organization it lives inside. I design and build for Stanford’s Graduate School of Education with a focus on leading design work for the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Through cunning folk, a two-person studio, I make websites that use poetry, friction, and delight to ask something of the people who visit them. And I build software for the people closest to me, including an operating system for my own household.
At the heart of my practice is a drive and a responsibility to make things that leave people more capable than they were before. To spark curiosity, to encourage self-sufficiency, to help people uncover their unique gifts.