I translate between worlds. Between designers and engineers, artists and hackers, users and developers, physical spaces and digital systems. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years — and it started long before I had words for it.
Perspective
Back at art school, I made objects that looked different depending on where you stand. There is no right and no wrong — only different perspectives, and a better or less fitting response depending on context. That idea never left me.
What started as a design principle became a UX vision. If you want to order a coffee in France, it helps to speak French. If you want to reach someone, it helps to speak their language — not yours. The same is true for systems: technology must adapt to the people who use it, not the other way around. That conviction shaped my UX career, it drives Polychat, and it drives how I build communities — always starting from where people actually are.
A large part of my work is understanding my clients and their audiences — sometimes more deeply than they understand themselves. I listen for the obstacles, the options, the unspoken tensions. And then I offer the best possible solution — not the most obvious one, but the one that actually fits.
When I hang a disco ball in the trees at an outdoor gathering, or project Super-8 film onto the walls of a party full of software developers, I’m doing the same thing from a different angle — mixing contexts, breaking frames, letting the analogue meet the digital. At one of those gatherings, an IT engineer walked up and asked if he could try my analogue camera. That moment became a mission: creating environments where people can step beyond their own field — expanding familiar processes across new neural pathways. When people cross boundaries, creativity flows, understanding grows, and we start seeing parallels instead of differences.
Goldsmiths
I studied design at Goldsmiths, University of London — an institution internationally known for experimental art, design, and cultural theory. Goldsmiths has a long tradition of interdisciplinary approaches where art, media, technology, and social practice intersect.
This environment shaped my way of working: focusing on context, experience, and cultural environments rather than purely object-based design. It gave me a deep sensitivity to atmosphere, spatial perception, and the experiential dimension of environments — and the conviction that design is always about more than the visible.
The Red Thread
Looking back across my career — from London’s music and art scene, through Berlin’s hacker culture and corporate UX leadership, to international community work — the constant has always been the same: I design environments where people can connect and create together.
The medium changes. The underlying work doesn’t. Whether I’m shaping a publication that documents a global music movement, coordinating the public voice of one of the world’s oldest hackerspaces, leading a UX team through organisational transformation, or facilitating a workation where developers and artists live and build together — I’m always asking: What does this environment need so that the people within it can do their best work?
Perspective & Method
Beyond product and infrastructure work, I integrate structured perspective-based inquiry into my processes. Trained in methods such as The Work, I help teams and individuals surface assumptions, navigate tension, and regain clarity in moments of fragmentation or transition.
Interoperability is not only a technical question. It is cultural, organisational, and cognitive. The same structural dynamics are at work — whether in large ecosystems or independent ventures.