Assemble is a tool that helps anyone understand how a citizens' assembly works, envision how it could impact their community, and finally advocate to make one a reality.

It reflects my belief in change by design: the idea that it is possible to reshape society through well-designed tools and systems that change people's behavior in ways that are inspiring, creative, and engaging.

The failures of our democracy today — polarization, gridlock, and short-term thinking — are the result of flaws in its centuries-old design.

Democracy Creative is a nonprofit organization working to more deeply understand these problems and design solutions for them.

I never bought an NFT before this project, and I haven't bought one since.

But any chance you have to create something — whether it's a skyscraper or a set of pixelated cat NFTs — is a platform to bring a dose of love and truth into the world, knowing that it will ripple out in ways you may never fully comprehend. I try to do that with everything I do, because otherwise I feel like I'm wasting my life.

These were 60 small wooden panels that I painted together as one piece, then broke apart and sent individually to family, friends, and acquaintances for the holidays.

Expressing love like this was not all that comfortable for me. It was a personal challenge but I knew it was the right thing. Life is series of moments where we can either give in to our fears, or do something great despite them. I don't always take the better path, but I try. And the small wins, like this, add up.

When something is bothering me there's usually an underlying shift in thinking that can clear it up. It takes time to go down and find it, but it's always worth it. Because next time I have that feeling, I can remember that I dove into the heart of it, and found the shift that shattered the illusion.

I think all the world's wisdom has been discovered through a similar process. It's the same process as design and creativity in general. Diving down to understand your own emotions until you get to an insight is the same skill of mindful focus that is required to dive into a design problem until you make a breakthrough.

Sometimes I memorialize these insights so I don't forget them. These are a series of small paintings that I made when I was using my desk as an art studio during COVID.

In my high school art class, I remember a teacher telling me that the purpose of art is to make us think. She had good intentions, but I think she was wrong.

Because the greatest art ever made actually has the rare ability of stopping our thoughts dead in their tracks. The Pietà, like a spectacular sunset, stuns your mind still with its beauty.

Since I can't paint like Van Gogh or Monet, I took the easy way out with this one. It remains only aspirational.

One day, in search of an insight to quiet my anxiety, I decided to dive deeper and deeper until I found the deepest insight I could possibly find: the one that would quiet every form of my anxiety, forever. My brain almost broke. But to my surprise, I actually found it. In that moment I felt more alive and at peace than I ever had before.

Now, it's just a matter of remembering it, and returning to the place that insight took me to. That part, no doubt, takes a lifetime.

In 2020, I ran for State Representative, and IT IS POSSIBLE was the theme.

The creative work of the campaign was interesting, and I'm proud of it. But the most interesting thing is that I lost. And it taught me, more viscerally than ever, the importance of failing early and often.

Some people hold on to unfollowed dreams until the day they die: running for office, starting a business, opening a restaurant, traveling the world. The tragedy is not that you might succeed if you try, or that you have to live with the regret of not trying. It's that if you give it a shot, whether you succeed or fail, the space in your mind where you kept that old dream is freed up to be filled by a new one. That's the only way to evolve.

So try the things you think about trying. It's the only way to get somewhere.

This is a booklet I made to help gain support for the organization I was starting at the time, called "The Insitute for Art In Politics." That organization eventually became Democracy Creative.

JFK said that the connection between art and politics was easy to feel but "hard to explain logically." I have found this to be true. The best way I could communicate it at the time was by presenting these quotes in a way that might inspire others to connect the dots themselves.

In 2018 I was asked to help organize and photograph The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, VT.

The energy in the room was explosive. At the time, Bernie Sanders was contemplating whether or not to run for President in 2020. After coming so close in 2016, everyone there knew he had a real shot of winning. This buzz gave everything an intense positive charge. I wanted to capture the love, enthusiasm, and profound ideas shared there in a way that the rest of the world, who did not have the privilege to be there, could feel.

So after the event, I worked with the Institute to create a full-length book of photos and insights, aiming to capture the soul of the event.

In 2017, I ran for City Council, challenging the more conservative incumbent in the South End of Burlington, VT.

I designed the lit pieces myself. I thought that if they were clearly made with more care than what people were used to seeing from a political campaign, they might think twice before throwing it straight in the trash.

In hindsight, that proved to be true.

On January 21st, 2017, I was supposed to meet up with my then-boss, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, and his family to take pictures at the Women's March on Washington. The March was so packed, however, that we could not get to each other.

Alone with my camera in the sea of people, I took as many pictures as I could. And in the year-and-a-half that followed, I worked to turn them into a photography book.

After many rounds of editing and re-arranging, a poem emerged. Each line,  paired with a picture of a person holding a sign, was my attempt to distill that signs' message into a more fundamental truth that anyone, regardless of political affiliation, could understand.

Skyris was a music + tech startup that I co-founded with two friends toward the end of my time as a music producer. The idea was to connect music with physical objects, replacing the tangibility of records in the digital age.

Like many things, it didn't quite work out. But this project launched my deeper dive into what it meant to be a designer.

Spektrem was the name I produced music under as my first career. It began in 2012 when my first song, In a Dream became a surprise hit in my college town. It ended in 2016 with the last song I made, Don't Look Down.

The most significant recording from this period is “Shine”, which found a home in the world of NoCopyrightSounds and has amassed over a hundred million plays as of today. Ten years later, it's amazing to me that Shine, and the other songs, still have a loyal base of support.

I don't make music anymore, but it shaped my understanding of the creative process. I still view every creative project as a song, just with different tools and instruments.

A year after I released what I thought was my final song, I wove together fragments of old songs I had never released, and turned them into an album.

As I was working on it, I knew Don't Look Down would be my last song. It captures the sadness of something ending, with the hope of something new beginning.

Miles Above You took me longer to produce than any other, almost two years. I tried so many versions before it finally clicked. It was by far the most intensive production I ever did. It felt like it would never end.

I worked on Shine for over a year. I never felt like I got the sound right. For the first two months after releasing it, I was disappointed and felt like I had wasted my time.

Then I woke up one morning to discover that NoCopyrightSounds had shared it, and it changed the course of my life.

Of all the songs I made, Loretta was the one that made people go the most nuts when we played it live.

Enter The Spektrem was an EP I released in 2013 consisting of 4 songs. The first three all have their own pages. The 4th was a remix of a Calvin Harris song.

Dirtybuzz is my least-listened to song, but its probably my favorite. It was my first venture outside of the standard 128BPM house music. I think of it like an electronic version of Rage Against The Machine crossed with Tomorrow Never Knows.

Sugar was released during a phase where I was trying to spend less time perfecting my songs. This is where I started to learn the difference between wasting time on details that don't matter, and taking the time to get the important ones right. There's a difference, and a lot of people don't know what it is.

Corr is another example of a song I released before I’d gotten it right. It’s a really subtle thing, getting the kick drum to gel perfectly with the bassline, so that when you hear it, you just have to move your body.

So when I hear Corr, I hear unfulfilled potential. Because I was trying to cut back on production time, even if it cost on quality.

All Too Soon was the follow up to my first song, which was a big hit for me. It was also the first of my electronic songs that I sang on.

In a Dream was my first "hit" song. By hit, I mean it was a hit in my college town, where I would hear it blasting out of cars and playing at parties.

And it did well on the music blogs of the time. It rose to #1 one on a popular music-ranking website at the time called FindNewJams, which was like a Reddit for new music. It stayed in the top spot for almost a month. A team in Miami found it and wanted to become my managers, and I agreed.

For me, who had never released an electronic song before, it was a massive experience, and it gave me the confidence to keep making music.

I made music since the age of 12. My focus was always on songwriting. I only cared about instruments to the degree that I could write songs on them.

One of the first things I was really proud of was reaching my goal of writing and recording 100 songs before I left for college. It felt like a big accomplishment, and it laid the groundwork for my time as a music producer a few years later.