I create, cultivate and write about digital interfaces and experiences as they shape relationships to places in transition. Methods: I write, I listen, I collaborate, I imagine.
I'm a scholar-practitioner specialising in collaborative, archive-led creative practice and the civic design of digital infrastructure. My work mostly spans cultural heritage interpretation, digital governance and urban technology.
While many urban technologists see the city as data, I see it as an archive of noisy events, voices, habitats and governing conditions.
I deliberately straddle scholarship and collaborative practice, and lean heavily into live experimentation as strategy. I am particularly committed to ensuring the public record is one that future generations can continue to be inspired by and shape, with agency and purpose. By that I mean that we have digital archives and collections that are open and accessible as public goods, and inspire creative connections with the past.
This focus has led to a long-standing interest in how certain digital platforms can, by their design, limit access to shared digital resources and, over time, produce unhealthy knowledge practices. I wrote a book on this called Platform Urbanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) which examined the historical emergence of global platforms in shaping urban policy and infrastructure.
My current research enquiry focuses on the collisions of AI sovereignties and citizen-AI activism in cities, and the governance protocols and pathways that underpin them. My disciplinary home is urban digital geography, specifically the historical and political geography of digital cities, but much of my practice is also creative and collaborative.
Practice-wise I work with multidisciplinary teams to build and prototype helpful interfaces and story-lines that connect us to the places we live in and that sustain us. This work is funded through a range of partnerships and collaborations: research fellowships, start-up grants, project commissions, and self-funded and government R&D.
My key platforms are STORYBOX Places, Civic Interplay and Studio ESEM, and I maintain a listening practice through Soundwalking.
You can read my 2025 Manifesto here.
I came to digital cities out of a concern for what a 'data-driven' approach leaves out. I came to archives in recognition that technology futures too often like to forget the past. So I try to make a habit of digging, retrieving and re-assembling.
My PhD (2005–2010) used ambient sound archives to build mobile listening experiences that surfaced contested spatial histories, reimagining real-time city technologies as connection points to the real times of space. In 2008 that became Sydney Sidetracks, the ABC's first location-based service, which let people stand in Martin Place and hear it in 1945. I've continued to evolve my sound and listening practice for the past fifteen years.
In 2012 I negotiated the release of ABC television and radio archive material under Creative Commons, through a partnership with ABC Pool called Past Forward. Talbot Duckmanton reporting the end of the war, Juanita Nielsen on why she loved the Cross the year before she disappeared, Bea Miles, Chow Hayes, Wendy Bacon marking an eviction on Victoria Street.
This practice continues: bringing data, stories, and archives into the open, whether under open licences or in shared spaces where they can be encountered in new ways.
I work as a strategy adviser for selected organisations, building on my early career in policy and organisational change. I wrote the ABC's organisation-wide digital strategy and the Australia Council's first national creative industries strategy, and have delivered research and strategy for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet through Data61, UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Create NSW, the NSW Government Architect and the Australian Museum. Some of my strategy projects can be explored here.
With my creative and life partner Michael Killalea I founded Esem Projects in 2013. This began as a creative idea, and turned into a studio practice running for over a decade. We rebranded as Studio ESEM in 2023, using creative and experiential design methods to bring to life the stories that shape places through time. Partners and clients include the Australian Museum, the ABC, HASSELL, the NSW Government Architect and many local government agencies.
In 2020 we developed STORYBOX Places as participatory digital infrastructure, and have since delivered over forty digital placemaking programs through this initiative.
My current enquiry is the collision of AI sovereignties with citizen-AI activism in cities, and the governance protocols that underpin them. It follows on from my book Platform Urbanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which examined the rise of platform business models as an emergent governance infrastructure for cities, and helped to shape a lively field of digital geography (Google Scholar citations c2026, 700+).
Running through the scholarship and studio practice is a long-form narrative inquiry into how digital systems reshape place, citizenship and collective governance. Golden threads structuring space through time, resisting what Jameson once called 'the actuarial colonisation of the unknown'. I am writing a book about it, Still Here, structured as a topographical excavation of sites through modes of encounter: listening, reading, installing, diagnosing, gathering, letting go.
I am based in Sydney. Outside of work I keep a body-based practice through Pilates, yoga, cycling and dance, and a long-standing interest in deep-time writing as a counterweight to the accelerationist logics of the systems I study.
Perhaps this can all be put simply: how we draw the lines that shape the spines that carry our lives, briefly, on this earth awhile.
Before RMIT I held an Industry Fellowship at the QUT Design Lab and a Visiting Fellowship at the Melbourne Centre for Cities (2021–22), and before that was Engaged Research Fellow (2018–19) and Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2014–17) at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
I co-directed Esem Projects from 2013 to 2022. My previous roles have included Manager of Strategic Initiatives at the UTS Creative Industries Innovation Centre, Smart Cities SME at CSIRO/Data61, and Senior Consultant in Urban Informatics at Arup.
My career began in public policy in 2000, with roles across the Department of Communications, the media and telecommunications think-tank Network Insight, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Australia Council for the Arts and the ABC, where I led digital R&D for new media platforms across broadband, interactive television, digital emergencies and mobile.