I'm a pioneering commercial semiotician with 25 years' experience, offering unique insights to world-class brands and companies (e.g., Coca-Cola, Ubisoft, Colgate, Prudential, and BBC Studios) around everything from brand strategy, marketing, and design to innovation.I'm also a writer, editor, and publisher. Currently, I'm editor of RADIUM AGE, a sci-fi book series from The MIT Press, as well as publisher of the websites HILOBROW and SEMIOVOX. I'm author and editor of over a dozen books, including: "More Voices from the Radium Age" (The MIT Press, 2023), "Lost Objects" (Hat & Beard, 2022), and "The Adventurer's Glossary" (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021). I helped start the Boston Globe's IDEAS section; and I used to publish HERMENAUT.In collaboration with Rob Walker, I've spent years exploring the emotional investment that humans make in inanimate objects — via the literary/anthropological experiments Significant Objects (2009–2012) and Project:Object (2017–ongoing), and three books.I'd originally intended to be a teacher, so I've greatly enjoyed opportunities to speak with classes at MIT, Harvard, MassArt, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and elsewhere. Recently I've become an adjunct instructor in the Master of Industrial Design program at RISD.