Art Builds
Together with colleagues at USD I’ve started Art Builds, an artist collective focused on creating large sculpture installations that probe important social and philosophical puzzles. We want to know how the collective and interdisciplinary act of creating large sculptures helps us better understand and appreciate what it means to be human and to live together well. Our core team is based in Southern California and together we have decades of experience in large format sculpture, design, engineering, lighting, electronics, and structural analysis. Personally, I see Art Builds as a vector for better understanding where new ideas come from. This thinking takes the form of a book project (co-authored with Gordon Hoople, and under advanced contract from Cambridge University Press) on what collaborative art tells us about the future of creativity.
Open Access
As a Knowledge Futures Group MIT Publishing Innovation Fellow I collaboratively explored the possibility of building the world’s first completely and comprehensively open access book. By this I mean the book’s raw data was scraped from public sources, the final dataset is publicly archived, the manuscript underwent an open peer review, and the final manuscript will be a free open access book. This project is borne of a conviction that Data should be open, Knowledge should be free, and Free knowledge should be well-informed. Listen to a podcast on the process.
The Good Drone Lab
I am founder and director (with Tautvydas Juškauskas and Gordon Hoople) of the Good Drone Lab, a research initiative focused on drone use by civil society and for the public good. The Lab has conducted award-winning methods for estimating crowd size, published a groundbreaking study of non-violent drone use, leveraged NSF-funding to develop a robust approach to sociotechnical teaching, and supported civil society efforts that have generated more than 100,000 video views. Our work has won awards both industry and the academy and been featured in Fast Company. The Lab is now a part of USD’s SPARK Social Innovation Institute, where I am the Faculty Director.