People of Long Now

James is a designer and technologist living at sea aboard a sailboat called Rejoice. He has been working with Long Now since 02000, and helped design and engineer The Rosetta Project and Long Bets. In 02021, he designed and built this very website. James has over twenty five years of experience helping organizations of all sizes transform ambiguous complexity into powerful tools that help people better understand themselves and the world around them. He was a senior product designer at Google for seven years, where he led design projects on Search, Material, and Fuchsia. Before that, he was design director at Metaweb where he spent five years helping design and develop the technologies that became the foundation for Google's Knowledge Graph.

In 02018, James and his wife Kristie Dahlia left San Francisco to become liveaboard sailors. He lives like this because everything great about being human is clearest to him on a small boat in the middle of the sea, and understanding what's great about being human is the first responsibility of the designer. His present understanding demands that he work on things that prioritize curiosity over certainty, agency over convenience, awareness over distraction, and the natural world over virtual ones, a set of values that deeply resonate with those of Long Now.

Read more about James and his sailing adventures on his website, Getting Free.