Bergen, Vestland, Norway
I am an educator, researcher, and academic leader with 25 years of international experience across design, architecture, and urbanism. My work explores how design shapes human experience and how educators and institutions can respond to social, cultural, and environmental challenges. My leadership philosophy blends Californian openness with Scandinavian collaboration: the research-driven practice I developed at UC Berkeley and the trust-based, empathetic culture I have practiced for a decade at the University of Bergen’s Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD). I believe institutions are built on rules but run on relationships. Leadership, for me, means coordinating intelligence, fostering transparency, and creating conditions where everyone can succeed. We all do better when we ALL do better. From 2019 to 2024 I served as Graduate Coordinator for the MA Programme in Design at UiB, leading curriculum development, quality assurance, and faculty collaboration while maintaining teaching and research. Earlier, as Director of the Graduate Program in Architecture in San Francisco, I guided NAAB accreditation, budgeting, and strategic planning. My teaching centers on research-informed, historically grounded, and ethical design practice. Students learn that designers literally create the worlds people inhabit—and carry responsibility for those experiences. I have taught in the U.S., Norway, and Uganda, in subjects from Evidence-Based Design to Architectural Theory. My research investigates design as a social and cultural practice. Projects include Toward a Natural History of Hostile Design, studies of discursive design and park politics, and critical histories of design thinking. Across them runs a concern for how design can remediate—not just sustain—our shared environment. A proverb I am fond of states ”With great power comes great responsibility.” I am motivated by the conviction that design education and research can improve human life, not just by producing new forms, but by deepening our understanding of how people live, feel, and act within the environments we create.
Graduate Coordinator for the Institute of Design at the Kunst-Musikk-Design Faculty at the University of Bergen.
Developed and oversaw the Master of Urban Systems Design Program