I'm a founder and principal of Kicker Studio, a design consultancy for consumer electronics, appliances, devices, and interactive environments, specializing in touchscreens and interactive gestures. I'm an interaction designer.

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: Designing Gestural Interfaces, which O'Reilly published in December 2008.

In 2006, New Riders published my introductory book on interaction design, Designing for Interaction. A second edition is planned for 2009.

I'm married to a beautiful, talented journalist, Rachael King, who currently writes for BusinessWeek Online. We have an eight-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 elsewhere.

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

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
Battlestar Galactica
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
Arcade Fire
Bishop Allen
Brendan Benson
Crowded House
Eels
Elastica
Elvis Costello
Emerson String Quartet
Fountains of Wayne
Liz Phair
Los Campesinos!
Mates of State
Paul Westerberg
Paula Carino
Radiohead
REM
Sinead O'Connor
Sleater-Kinney
The Beatles
The Decemberists
The Pixies
The Replacements
Sea Wolf
Shout Out Louds
Spoon
The Weakerthans
U2
Vampire Weekend
Weezer
Wilco