hello!

I am an assemblage of:
practices / movements / attunements
learnings / teachings / observations
architectures / pedagogies / technologies
families / friends / societies / cultures




I aim to be present.


Hi there.
I am changing.
Please stay tuned.

*

currently, I will describe myself as a practitioner, educator, and artist,

aiming to be in direct service to two of the primary practices that shape our lives:

the spatial and the relational.

*

You have come to this site at a particular moment, in which my practices are changing.

Currently (as of April 2026), I am directing my attention towards:

• Pursuing clinical social work, orienting towards an intention of practicing psychodynamic, somatic, and psychedelic psychotherapy

• Relational mindbody practices such as contact improvisation, meditation (vipassana & metta), butoh, and tai chi

• Attentional spaces and human-computer interfaces for mindfulness, presentness and affective attunement

• Keeping abreast of meaningful/critical/dystopian AI futures -- specifically, its intersection with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

• Repairing and crafting technology at Outside Computers

• Seeking sangha

(Here is the "CV" portion of the site):

Since 2014, I have been teaching at Columbia GSAPP as an adjunct assistant professor, where I focus on teaching architectural representation and experimental design tools meant to shape the agency of the designer. These days, I primarily teach a long-running course (over 10 years!) called Metatool within the Computational Design Practices program, and advise students on their CDP capstone projects.

From 2012 - 2018, I co-founded, co-designed and collectively grew Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative. Prime Produce is a 7500 sqft cooperatively-run space for social good, or a 'commune for work' based in NYC. To me, it is an experiment in creating a vibrant, cooperatively-run third place oriented around the practice of service.

From 2019 - 2023, I taught thesis studio courses at NYU Integrated Design and Media. From 2022 - 2023, I also taught thesis studio courses at Parsons' Design and Technology MFA program. In Summer 2024, I taught at Cornell AAP in the Urban Design program.

From 2018 - 2021 I co-founded and helped cultivate a collective studio environment in a 4000 sqft warehouse in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn called Soft Surplus. At its best moments, I think of it as a life-experiment by a community of friends in earnest world-building; gradually crafting a studio space out of a former auto body shop allowed us to dream ways of working and learning together - and to make some of it possible. Soft Surplus existed as a collective from 2018-2022.

As a co-'proprietor' of Outside Computers, I currently work as an designer and technologist, working in architectural design, data visualization, web development, art installation, and physical computing. Past clients for design & technology work include: Canadian Centre for Architecture, RISD, Stephanie Dinkins, Sidewalk Labs, Superbright, The New Inquiry, Vera Institute of Justice, Pioneer Works, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Spatial Information Design Lab, NEW INC/GSAPP Incubator, Cornell Citizens and Technology Lab, and Blue Cliff Monastery.

My design/community work has been mentioned/published in Urban Omnibus, The Creative Independent, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, The Politics of Parametricism, Project Journal, The New Yorker, The Observer, The Awl, Vice, The New York Times, among other publications.

Currently I am pursuing a MSW at Smith College's School of Social Work, orienting towards a long-term intention of practicing individual and group psychodynamic and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Things I am thinking about lately:

(as of 2026-01)

How are practices of relational work sutured with systems that attempt to scale at a societal level? Such as healthcare, social work, education? To some extent, the suturing is what makes a practice valuable and infrastructural, because it is powerful enough to change not just one life, but many. (Sutured practices manifest as acronyms: SSI, SSD, SSDI, DFTA, APS, CPS, SCRIE, SNAP...) To another extent, the suturing, often to an institutional behemoth, requests or demands repeatability, regularity, manualization, documentation. Without this suture, forms of practice often cannot become infrastructure, and may result in a powerless aesthetics of care. With this suture, forms of practice might sometimes lose an aspect of what made them caring in the first place: some intangible, dare-I-say mystical space of possibility that actually exists outside of the logic of productivity/capitalism/efficiency, and in the realm of attunement, openness, presentness. How to find the balance?

How will AI shape us, all of us, in ways we cannot even begin to imagine yet? Cognitive distortions around power, knowledge, ability will be abound -- a kind of ability dysmorphia. Will software and technology become both hypersurveilled and also hyper-specific, enabling a near-infinite flourishing of niche projects, weird softwares, arcane paradigms? For some, will software be treated less as a stable 'app' or entity that one 'ships' or 'produces', and more as a kind of malleable clay or magic that one summons and manipulates at will, here and now? A world trained on parasocial relationships will neatly transition into parahuman relationships; perhaps 8 Billion peoples' understandings of ourselves will be nudged and shaped by a handful of models, and their particular moralities alignments, for once risking being a global cultural or cognitive homogenizer? More than anything, the constant awareness that you can find the "right answer" will probably have a massive cultural impact on our relationship to uncertainty, idiosyncracy, imperfection, limitation, and challenge… but in what ways?

What (actually) meaningful work exists at the intersection of presentness, mental 'health', and technology? Why is almost all work at this intersection predictably shallow -- usually a medicalized version of technology, in which a device serves the conceptual role of a medicine or a surgical procedure -- an augmentation that can 'fix' you? Where are the theories of change at this intersection? What is the theoretical framework that might help us understand why finding an intersection of psychotherapy/psychotechnology, technology, and the built environment is difficult? Is this because most practices deal with thoughts or emotions, and not the secret third thing at the core of it all? (seriously, if you have thoughts, let's talk)

What meta-frameworks might we use to understand practices at the intersections of disciplines? Or: is it even possible to intersect disciplines, perhaps? Are they less so 'countries on a map', and more so different epistemologies constructed on different apparati altogether, the way that 'seeing' and 'hearing', constructed on top of eyes and ears, can coordinate towards crafting a shared reality, precisely because their sensory processes are often completely disconnected from each other?

When someone appears trapped by their own suffering, so much so that they do not recognize that they are trapped by their own suffering (thus trapping themselves in their own ego-syntonic suffering), what can you do / how can we be with them? / what kind of presence can we offer?

(past things I have been thinking about)

Texts I'm thinking about / (re)reading lately:

More things I am interested in: Are.na

hello!


If you'd like to say hello; hello! I'm at

dan [at] dantaeyoung [dot] com.

or

tae [at] dantaeyoung [dot] com.

(a trail weaves into the landscape)