David Colby Reed

M Wade Holler

David Colby Reed serves as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. He works to build equity into the architectures of sociotechnical systems drawing from his skills as a systems designer, educator, and technologist. David is pursuing a doctoral degree at the Media Lab with research focusing on designing participation, voice, and equity into the architectures of complex systems including the future communities that humans will create beyond Earth. The Big Idea is to design systems that create patterns of social relations that are compatible with democratic processes. Prior to coming to MIT, David co-founded, with Lee-Sean Huang, Foossa, a service design and strategy consulting practice based in NYC. Via Foossa, David worked to design public services for the City of New York, storytelling experiences for the Kigali Genocide Memorial, technology tools for multilateral organizations, and financial instruments to advance economic security, among other projects. David is a past Fellow of the Assembly program at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and a former trustee of the NYC chapter of the Awesome Foundation. David studied cognitive science at Harvard, public policy and economics at NYU.