Before Consensus: Selected Work

The music industry was still trying to stop what was already happening when this book came out. An account of the first structural collapse of music as a packaged product. Who saw it coming, who didn't, and what it revealed about how entrenched industries misread change. New York Times Notable Book. New York Times Best Books Since 2000, 2025.

A portrait of Humberto and Fernando Campana that uses Brasilia — the failed utopian city — as a lens for understanding designers who turned imperfection into a methodology. Written from inside São Paulo's productive chaos. The poetry of error as a design philosophy.

An architectural feature that reads, in retrospect, as early thinking about immersion as a brand strategy. The flagship as temple. The velvet rope as initiation. The purse as magical object.

Technical journalism about IPv6 at the moment the address space problem was still invisible to most. The infrastructure of the future, written before it was infrastructure. An address is a form of existence. What can be located can be acted on.

At the moment computing was moving from labs to what everyone had in their hands all day long and couldn't stop looking at, this book made it physical again. Fifty machines from the Computer History Museum, photographed as objects of intention. History made visible.

A framework for forces that had only just begun to coalesce and reshape how we produce and consume video. Named nine properties of something that wouldn't fully exist for five more years. Published a year before the iPhone launched.

A profile of an artist whose work follows biological materials through transformation — oysters, fungus, hydroponic glass pods. On observation as the fundamental scientific skill, and why a notebook was pretty much all Darwin had.

Ten reflections on the graphical interface as it became the operating environment of modern life — no longer just making sense of the world, but shaping what sense is possible.

A conversation with an artist who grows buildings out of mushrooms and teaches plant cloning as a social event. On the thin line between art and biology, and why genetic engineering is just another form of cooking. San Francisco's biotech counterculture, seen from inside.

A critical review of the Rams retrospective at SFMOMA that reframes him as a systems designer as much as a functionalist. Setting the standard for what becomes normal and intuitive is a position of responsibility. Later used as teaching material at Pratt.

Multimodal interfaces were becoming inevitable as computing moved out into physical lives and environments, but most designers had no vocabulary for the problem, no frameworks, no working methods to move interaction out into the real world. This started building them.