About

Ron Bronson (b. Plainfield, New Jersey) is a critical urbanist, speculative designer, and writer whose practice fuses social and financial engineering. It studies the everyday frictions of daily life to ask how we’re meant to live in a world permanently distorted by disruptive technologies and how those impacts scale downward to how people are made to live inside systems they did not design: forms, feeds, defaults, categories, queues, third-party platforms, and the disintermediation of platformisation.

With a background in web development and broad approach to human-centered design, his practice seeks to identify and name the unwritten rules of bureaucracies and daily life. Bronson’s mediums range from card decks, digital artifacts, and participatory design events.

He is the author of The Hidden Cost of Everything: Decentering the User Experience (2021). He has spoken at design and tech events around the globe, including in Oslo, Barcelona, Cape Town, Toronto, and Vancouver, and lectured at universities including Indiana University, Portland State University, George Fox University, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Art Academy of Latvia.

His speculative and participatory work includes Pensulo (2015), Death to UX (2022), A Parliament of Neighbors (2023), and Manipulation Engineering (2024). He is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Urban Technology at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.