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.
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currently, I will describe myself as a practitioner, educator, and artist,
aiming to be of service to the two primary mediums that shape our lives:
the spatial and the social.
*
You have come to this site at a particular moment, in which my practices are changing.
Currently (as of January 2026), I am directing my attention towards:
• Pursuing clinical social work as a social and psychotherapeutic practice
• Psychotechnologies, and mental health practices, such as psychotherapy, somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, psychedelic therapy, group therapy
• Relational and mindbody practices such as contact improvisation and meditation
• Attentional spaces and human-computer interfaces for mindfulness, presentness and affective attunement
• Keeping abreast of meaningful/critical/dystopian AI futures and possibilities
• 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, it was 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 ended in 2022.
I also work as an designer and consultant, 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
My 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.
(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 both valuable, because it is powerful enough to change a life. (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 an 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, mystical space of possibility that actually exists outside of the logic of productivity/capitalism/efficiency, and in the realm of attunement, openness, presentness.
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 is trapped by their own suffering, so much so that they do not recognize that they are trapped by their own suffering (and 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?
Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building & The Nature of Order
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic
Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker
Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
David Abram, The Spell of The Sensuous
Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry
Irvin Yalom, Love's Executioner,
China Mieville, October
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
Sal Randolph, The Uses of Art
R. D. Laing, Knots
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self
김연수, 이토록 평범한 미래
Rob Burbea, Seeing that Frees
Alan Watts, Become Who You Are
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
bell hooks, All About Love
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child,
Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self,
Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us
김혜진, 딸에 대하여
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism
Wendy Chun, On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge
Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness
Édouard Glissant, For Opacity, from Poetics of Relation
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
Edward Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
Molly Wright Steenson, Architectural Intelligence
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy
Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Gordon Pask, The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics
Bruno Latour, The Berlin Key
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Jodi Dean, Communicative Capitalism
Bruno Latour, Reassembling The Social
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension
More things I am interested in: Are.na
I spoke at the "AI Actioning Summit", on Spatial AI, or "How will AI affect the relationship between designers and tools?", Nov 1, 2024
I spoke at "The Internet(s) of Everything" , June 8, 2021
I spoke at "The end of the beginning of The Student Visa Review", a panel alongside with Menna Agha, Ashraf Salama, about a project I created as part of SURPLUS+ with Shea Fitzpatrick and Lucy Liu for RISD and the Canadian Center for Architecture. May 31, 2021
I spoke at "Roundable Discussion: COMMONS", a panel at the Yale School Of Architecture, hosted by the M.E.D Working Group for Anti-Racism, alongside Lauren Hudson, Sunny Iyer, and Rachel Valinsky. Nov 11, 2020
I spoke at Tei Carpenter's "By Other Means" seminar at the University of Toronto on Soft Surplus, Prime Produce, and alternative practices. Oct 16, 2020.
I spoke at Columbia GSAPP as part of the Techno-Critical Assemblies event series, organized by Andres Jaque and Xiaoxi Chen. Oct 15, 2020.
I launched the GSAPP Skill Trails. Jun 26, 2020.
I wrote a short polemic for Avery Shorts called WORMspace: WORMspace is what happens when you turn the residential lease and "normal wear and tear" into an aesthetic. It is an aesthetic of landlord power.. Nov 26, 2019.
I spoke at Neba Noyan's class, "Data Is Storytelling", on growing communities, spaces, and spatial programming languages. Oct 16, 2019.
The Cybernetics Library held an installation and workshop at the Tate Modern as part of the Higher Resolution with Hyphen-Labs workshop series at the Tate Exchange. September 27-29, 2019.
Intentional Estate Agency, a collaboration with Tei Carpenter, Jesse LeCavalier, and Chris Woebken, was part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale: The Architecture of Degrowth. Sep 26, 2019.
The Cybernetics Library had a booth and held a workshop at the NY Art Book Fair on Sunday, September 22nd, at 2pm. Invited by Printed Matter.
I wrote Tools of Collective Intelligence, published by Urban Omnibus, on invitation by Shannon Mattern. Sep 4, 2019.
I did a short Micro-residency at Dynamicland! Aug 7 - Aug 14, 2019.
I spoke on a panel on the future of work for the Out of Office exhibition at A/D/O, curated by Lexi Tsien and Talitha Liu of Soft-Firm, alongside Florian Idenburg and Kate Thatcher, moderated by Joseph White. July 18, 2019.
I was a speaker at Software For Artists Day, Pioneer Works. June 15, 2019.
An interview with Willa Köerner was published in The Creative Independent: On growing a cooperative like you’d grow a garden. June 11, 2019.
I was a resident as part of The Strange Foundation's Decelerator residency program. May 19 - May 27, 2019.
I spoke at the Living a Digital Life: Objects, Environments, Power conference, hosted at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning. May 10, 2019.
The Cybernetics Library hosted a workshop called Cybernetic Marginalia, as part of February School, a temporary school-as-intervention created by MIT ACT students.
If you'd like to say hello; hello! I'm at
dan [at] dantaeyoung [dot] com.