Embedded Files
This page highlights together my public writing and scholarly work on technology, institutions, and the social dimensions of design, climate, and energy. Across formats and audiences, I’m interested in how ideas move from theory into professional practice, policy, and everyday life.
The work below includes short-form public writing, peer-reviewed scholarship, and public communication, uniting long-running lines of inquiry that continue to inform my applied work and teaching.
Public Writing: Consuming Tech column for ACM Interactions
Public Writing: Consuming Tech column for ACM Interactions
Early foundations
Big Data, Diminished Design? (2014)
Big Data, Diminished Design? (2014)
Questioning data-driven decision-making before automation became ubiquitous.
This column examined whether the growing reliance on large datasets risked narrowing professional judgment rather than enhancing it—anticipating contemporary debates about automation, expertise, and human oversight in AI-enabled systems.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
Making: Movement or Brand? (2014)
Making: Movement or Brand? (2014)
Examining how participatory practices become market categories.
This piece examined how practices framed as participatory and grassroots become stabilized, branded, and monetized—foreshadowing later debates about platforms, labor, and the commercialization of participation.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
Demo or Die? The Role of Video Demonstrations in the Public Domain (2013)
Demo or Die? The Role of Video Demonstrations in the Public Domain (2013)
Understanding visibility as part of technical practice.
This column explored how public demonstrations and instructional media shape legitimacy and participation—anticipating today’s attention economies, platform metrics, and performative forms of expertise.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
Taking the New Neologisms Offline (2013)
Taking the New Neologisms Offline (2013)
Interrogating emerging tech language before it hardens into common sense.
This column questioned how new technological terms circulate and stabilize, arguing for closer attention to how language shapes expectations, regulation, and institutional response—an issue now central to AI governance debates.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
Click a Bird on It (2012)
Click a Bird on It (2012)
Reflecting on remix, circulation, and attribution online.
This piece examined how simple acts of reuse and modification complicate ideas of ownership and originality—issues that now sit at the heart of platform governance and generative AI.
Old Hat: Craft versus Design? (2012)
Old Hat: Craft versus Design? (2012)
Questioning binaries that structure technical expertise.
This column challenged simplistic distinctions between craft and design, anticipating contemporary concerns about automation, skill, and the changing boundaries of professional expertise.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
AI, Energy, and Institutional Complexity
AI, Energy, and Institutional Complexity
Taken together, these earlier columns reflect a sustained interest in how technical systems interact with social norms, markets, and institutions. As computation has moved from personal tools to infrastructural systems, shaping energy use, governance, and everyday life, those questions have taken on new urgency.
Cutting Through the Code: Will AI Bring Efficiency or Reinforce Complexity? (2024)
Cutting Through the Code: Will AI Bring Efficiency or Reinforce Complexity? (2024)
Examining how automation reshapes institutional systems.c
This column explored how AI interacts with regulation and organizational structures, challenging assumptions that automation naturally produces efficiency and showing how complexity is often redistributed rather than eliminated.
Steaming Ahead: Will AI Amplify Electric Inequities? (2024)
Steaming Ahead: Will AI Amplify Electric Inequities? (2024)
Connecting AI development to energy systems and equity.
This piece examined how emerging AI technologies intersect with electric infrastructure and social inequities, arguing that automation unfolds within—and can intensify—existing institutional and infrastructural conditions.
Feeding AI, Eating Us (2025)
Feeding AI, Eating Us (2025)
Tracing the material and cultural costs of AI systems.
This column examined the extractive dimensions of contemporary AI—from data and labor to energy and infrastructure—connecting everyday technological convenience to broader social and environmental consequences.
co-authored with Daniela Rosner
Communicating High-Performance Building
Communicating High-Performance Building
Selected Scholarly Work
Selected Scholarly Work
My peer-reviewed research examines how markets, institutions, and professional norms shape judgment and expertise, with implications for technology adoption and practice.
IKEA Hacking
IKEA Hacking
Taste Regimes
Taste Regimes
Why is it that certain ways of doing things just seem right? We answer this question by defining taste regimes: discursively constructed normative systems that orchestrate practice in an aesthetically oriented culture of consumption. Collaborative work with Zeynep Arsel of Concordia University Montreal published in the February 2013 issue of Journal of Consumer Research.
Connecting Taste to Practice
Connecting Taste to Practice
As an interdisciplinary researcher, I am best known for my work on taste. My article Taste Regimes and Market-Mediated Practice, co-authored with Zeynep Arsel, recentered the role of taste in consumption and has been the foundation of a growing stream of research in marketing and other fields. In addition to the article, which has been cited by Michel Callon and Alan Warde, among others, we published the 2020 book Taste, Consumption and Markets: An Interdisciplinary Volume.
In 2021, with Anissa Pomiès, we edited a special issue of the journal Consumption Markets & Culture with contributions from leading scholars in the field.
In the News
In the News
Interviews & Media Mentions
Interviewer: Shaley Sanders/KOLD, November 1, 2021
Interviewer: Mark Brody/The Show, KJZZ (Phoenix), August 18, 2021
by Chris Malloy, Bloomberg City Lab, May 11, 2021
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