I’m a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, and a fair amount of my work explores the relationship between language, material culture, and human experience. For a long time now I’ve been interested in the social, political, and cultural sides of design and designing, and in particular how collaborative designing unfolds in face-to-face interaction. I’ve worked with architects in Los Angeles and furniture designers in Stockholm, and I’ve written some things on all of this, including a book on Swedish design.

I’m also drawn to studying hand gestures and other forms of embodiment in conversation, and I’ve been known to dabble in phenomenologicalish anthropology. And I really like Goffman, Geertz, and Garfinkel, which feels kind of like an admission, but also liberating, so I’m sticking with it. Anyway, there’s more to say but it’s mostly blabber at this point, so I’ll just mention that I’m currently working on a project about typography, typefaces, and why we care about fonts so much.