I'm an experience design director at the design consultancy Adaptive Path, specializing in interaction design.

In my "spare" time, I curate a site called No Ideas But In Things that collects physical interfaces for design inspiration. I also oversee a wiki for the collection of new interaction paradigms called Interactive Gestures that has spawned a new book I'm writing: Designing Gestural Interfaces. O'Reilly plans to publish it in Fall 2008.

In 2006, New Riders published my introductory book on interaction design, Designing for Interaction. A second edition is planned (by me anyway).

I'm married to a beautiful, talented journalist, Rachael King, who currently writes for BusinessWeek Online. We have a seven-year-old daughter Fiona who attends San Francisco Friends School.

I was born in Baltimore, went to high school in San Francisco, college in Los Angeles, and spent 10 years living and working in the New York City area, two years in Pittsburgh attending Carnegie Mellon's graduate program in interaction design and since then I've lived in San Francisco and am in no hurry to move elsehwere.

I'm an ENTJ, a Thinker, a T-Shaped Person, and an Aquarius. I'm of Irish, Polish, and German descent, which accounts for my humor, stubbornness, and perfectionism respectively.

I like redheads, ginger altoids, vanilla coke, and dogs.

I play the cello. Badly.

I have trouble drawing straight lines.

photo credit: L. Arthi Krishnaswami

Current Media
As of October 6, 2007, I'm reading Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand by Malcolm McCullough and The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schoen and listening to Reunion Tour by The Weakerthans, Twin Cinema by The New Pornographers, and More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley.

Desert Island Books
Cathedral, Raymond Carver
Shogun, James Clavell
White Noise, Don DeLillo
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Aubrey-Maturin Series, Patrick O'Brien
Risk Pool, Richard Russo
Blindness, Jose Saramago
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Desert Island Music
Revolver, The Beatles
The White Album, The Beatles
A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay
Time Out, The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Mozart's Requiem Mass, Sir Colin Davis, conductor
Bach's Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould
American Idiot, Green Day
Doolittle, The Pixies
Achtung Baby, U2
14 Songs, Paul Westerberg
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco

Obsessions
Aaron Sorkin TV Shows
Arts & Crafts Movement
Cello
Elvises (excluding Stojko)
Guinness
Historical Fiction
Jadite
Power Pop
Revolutionary War
Tea
Tivo

Writers
Charles Dickens
Cormac McCarthy
David Foster Wallace
Don DeLillo
James Joyce
Joe Queenan
John Updike
J.R.R. Tolkien
Neal Stephenson
Patrick O'Brian
Richard Russo
William Carlos Williams

TV
Deadwood
Homicide: Life on the Street
House Hunters
Lost
Real Time with Bill Maher
Six Feet Under
Sports Night
The Ben Stiller Show
The Daily Show
The Office
The Wire
Twin Peaks

Music
Ben Folds
Bishop Allen
Built to Spill
Crowded House
Eels
Elvis Costello
Fountains of Wayne
Liz Phair
Old 97s
Paul Westerberg
Paula Carino
REM
Sinead O'Connor
Sleater-Kinney
The Beatles
The Decemberists
The Pixies
The Replacements
The Weakerthans
U2
Weezer
Wilco