I'm a scholar-practitioner specialising in the civic design of digital infrastructure, and new methods for collaboration that make this possible. 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.
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, and has been cited over 700 times.
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 information and collections, and nurturing the possibilities that this creates in partnership with others.
My career began in 2000 at the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, examining the potential of the information economy in shaping Australia's knowledge economy. This included a focus on broadband, telecommunications infrastructure, and the role of media policy in shaping Australian public culture. I moved to Sydney to work with former ABC chair Mark Armstrong at Network Insight, a think tank dedicated to advancing fit-for-purpose media policy in an era of convergence. From there I worked in the ABC's New Media area for a spell, before moving to the Australia Council to design cultural and creative industries policy, then to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), where I commissioned research on the role of the Broadcasting Services Act in Australian television and film production, and delivered a national digital media literacy research study.
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.
In 2013 I led the ABC's organisation-wide digital strategy, working across the organisation to identify new genres and ways of working that would lead to a refreshed structure for the public broadcaster. I built a new digital emergencies platform for the ABC to report on emergencies using geo-located and social data.
These experiences in production and collections made me interested in what was happening with the emergence of digital platforms and open data, and what new technology configurations would do to shape future cities. I called this Platform Urbanism, and in 2014 was awarded an international fellowship to pursue this question across technologically advanced global cities.
So, with a public historian's interest in collections, a digital producer and strategist's interest in digital architecture, and an urbanist's fascination with the transformation of the built environment, I started to build a new field of research.
I remained interested in how digital methods of installation design could create different experiential interactions with places as they transform over time, and so with Michael Killalea, my creative partner, maintained a creative practice through Studio ESEM.
Michael and I founded Esem Projects in 2011. 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.
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.
Today I work as a strategic advisor for selected organisations, building on my early career in policy and organisational change. I have written three national strategies for public agencies: the Australia Council's first national creative industries strategy (2004), a national strategy on media literacy and communications for the Australian Communications and Media Authority (2008), and the ABC's organisation-wide mobile and digital strategy (2013).
I have since worked on state-based strategy, including the dashboard and data indicators strategy for the Greater Sydney Commission and the South Australian Arts Plan, and on data strategy for CSIRO and Data61, including for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. I have also delivered research and strategy for 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.
In 2023 I began to explore the potentials of regenerative data ecosystems with a new research fellowship at RMIT University. This enquiry has evolved to address the collision of AI sovereignties with citizen-AI activism in cities, and the governance protocols that underpin them. This work is being cultivated through a practice I call Civic Interplay, examining what new forms of collaboration and digital enquiry are possible in places shaped increasingly by agentic, co-intelligent systems.
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 and Melbourne, Australia. 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.