Four seminars for dual-listed undergraduate and graduate audiences — drawing on fifteen years building products at Social Bicycles, JUMP, Google, and Meta. Each course ships with a session-by-session reading list, instructor guide, and practitioner perspective.
The Series
Technology shapes space. Space shapes behavior. Behavior shapes products. These courses trace that chain — from the living room to the city to the org chart.
How do technologies reshape the spaces we inhabit? A 15-week seminar tracing the television, the automobile, the smartphone, and ambient AI through the built environment using STS frameworks.
Cities as complex systems; products as interventions. A seminar for planners, MBAs, and engineers building technology for urban environments. Includes a half-day field session.
Why hardware is different. A skills-first course covering BOM modeling, firmware strategy, supply chain, and the full arc of a physical-digital product lifecycle.
Organizations are products. A seminar applying Conway's Law, the Rule of Seven, and platform team theory to real product org design — from startups to enterprise to the agentic era.
These seminars are designed for dual-listed undergraduate and graduate audiences. Each course runs fifteen weeks and includes session-by-session reading lists with separate tracks for undergraduates (1–3 anchor texts per session) and graduate students (6–10 texts, full scholarly apparatus). A facilitation guide for instructors and TAs is available as a PDF download on each course page.
The courses draw on the same practitioner perspective that runs through my writing: I have built technology that reshapes urban space, managed teams that scaled from four people to four hundred, and watched the consequences of design decisions ripple outward in ways that weren't visible at the time. That experience is the courses' primary practitioner resource — not a substitute for the scholarly literature, but a complement to it.
If you are an instructor interested in adopting or adapting these materials, I welcome correspondence at @arcktip or via the Connect page.