About

I design technologies and the gatherings that hold them.

Most of my work starts with an existing social context – a dinner party, a seasonal ritual, a community town hall – and asks how an experience or interaction can strengthen connections or empower communal agency within that frame.

Creating conditions for connection is often a dance between placing constraints and empowering participation. In my practice, I think about how we can design products that embody our visions of the world, but also the processes that make that world possible. I work with communities to co-design and facilitate because an empowered group of people is how change actually happens.

That's the bet underneath the work: that if you ground technology development in groups who can create together, you get something different out the other end — infrastructure people take ownership of, rather than infrastructure that happens to them.

I spent four years designing conversational AI at Nuance and Cerence, leading design on nineteen products that shipped in cars, including work with Mercedes and a system that debuted at CES. It was an unglamorous education in how AI actually gets built: how much of an experience is decided in the details, how to specify something precisely enough that engineers can make it real, and how far the gap is between a system that works and a system that feels like anything.

In 2022 I went to the MIT Media Lab for a master's, working with Deb Roy at the Center for Constructive Communication. I used game design as a research method — building AI-driven games that help strangers reach the parts of a conversation people usually avoid, then measuring what actually changed. That work has been published at ACM CHI and shown at Ars Electronica, DIS, and Creativity & Cognition.

I'm now research staff at CCC, where I study social forms: how gatherings are designed, and what happens when technology is built into them. Recent work includes an immersive dinner series that connects strangers through audio artifacts, a conversation game that's run with community partners across four states, and an AI tool that compares what people say in public media with what they say to each other.

In 2025 I co-founded The Hearth, a collectively governed social club in Boston. It has 120 members, a space, a governance model, and a programme of events that range from fashion shows to seances. It's also where most of my ideas get tested before they're respectable.

I think isolation is a design problem. Not only a design problem — but the formats we've built for being together have gotten worse, and that's something you can work on directly. I'm interested in building the tools and the rooms that make us more capable of each other.

If this type of work interests you, please reach out! Would love to hear about what you’re hoping to build.