I am an Associate Professor at the ATLAS Institute and the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. I direct a research lab called the Unstable Design Lab and I have put most of my energy in the last 8 years to sharing the work of myself, my students, and collaborators on the Unstable Design Lab website.

The heart of my practice is designing interactive systems that participate in creative and reflective practices. I love patterns, notations, diagrams, excel spreadsheets, and communities that are passionate about their craft and sharing their craft with others. I especially love to design software systems that support experts doing hard things with lively materials–like complex weaving. My approach is to learn the domain I'm designing for in an embodied way and to use that embodied practice as a way of growing kinships across a community. My software serves as platforms for conversation between myself and others, and those conversations get codified into features and resources in the software. AdaCAD is my most ambitious project to date. It is a platform for designing and documenting complex weaving projects and is used by designers, artists, and researchers all over the world.

As a professor, my work has taken on an administrative dimension as I have sought to create a generative spaces at the university that engage art and engineering on equal terms . The focus of these spaces has been experimental weaving, a term we use at the lab to describe weaving practices that are characterized by curiosity and exploration rather than disciplinary affiliation.When we say weaving, it's not a metaphor -- it's literally weaving, with yarns, on looms!

Sometimes I wander into questions about how traditional academic formats and conventions co-shape the practice of design and research. I focus these questions on the academic community in "human-computer interaction" or HCI. I have a troubled relationship with the term "novelty" as so much of my work engages knowledge that aren't new, and aren't mine to own. So, I look to create alternative formats that attempt other ways of representing knowledge and practice .

The work that I do is deeply connected to the communities of which I have been part. I earned my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information under the advising of Kimiko Ryokai, who helped me understand how reflective design research could be practiced and presented. Daniela Rosner served as an informal mentor, especially as I transitioned from the PhD program to a professorship. She supported and encouraged me, helped me learn to write grants, and her work is always an inspiration to me. Kristina Andersen is a close friend and collaborator who always inspires me to bring more poetry and whimsy to my work. Steven Frost, the associate director of the Unstable Design Lab, has been by my side since I started at CU Boulder. They first helped me warp a loom, and then also helped me establish and build community at the Unstable Design Lab. This list cannot capture everyone who I work with and who inspires me and I do a better job of accounting for all of my collaborators on the Unstable Design Lab 'people' page and the AdaCAD contributors page