About

Over the years I’ve worn several hats: journalist, researcher, designer, corporate manager, academic librarian, grill cook, and hacky banjo player, to name a few.

At the moment I work by day as Head of User Experience at Google News, and recently completed my PhD in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. In years past I have held UX leadership roles at Instagram, Etsy, The New York Times, and IBM; and have consulted for clients including frog design, Adobe, Yahoo!, The New York Public Library, and the Internet Archive, among others. In my pre-Web life I worked as an academic librarian at Harvard, and briefly thought I wanted to be a rare books librarian—until this newfangled Internet thing came along. If you’d like to learn more about my checkered career past, feel free to peruse my Linkedin profile.

My most recent book, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. My previous book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages was published by the National Academies Press in 2007. My writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon.com, Interactions, Communications of the ACM, and elsewhere.

I occasionally speak at industry conferences and events, such as the SxSW, O’Reilly, and Gartner Group conferences. If you’re interested in having me come speak to your group, feel free to contact me.

On the personal front, I live in Brooklyn with my wife, two sons, one dog, and three banjos.

Bio | CV