Aaron is Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fond. He usually just tells people he is from the Internet.
Aaron is currently Editor at Large and the creator of the Who's On First project at Mapzen.
Between 2012 and 2015 he was Head of Engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, responsible for the architecture, implementation and general table-pounding of the museum's digital infrastructure as well as the creation and delivery of The Pen.
Before all of that, Aaron was Senior Engineer at Flickr focusing on all things geo, machinetag and galleries related between 2004 and 2009. From 2009 to 2011 he was Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names at Stamen Design, where he created the prettymaps and map=yes projects.
Aaron spends a lot of time thinking about archiving social software and looking glass
archives, in the form the Parallel Flickr and Privatesquare projects.
Previously a member of the Near Future Laboratory, Aaron has also served on the advisory board to the Built Works Registry as well as Co-Director of Revolutionary Technologies for the Spinny Bar History Society since 2010. Once upon a time he was still a painter.
Aaron's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the NACIS Atlas of Design and 20x200.
He is a frequent speaker at the Museums and the Web conference and was a keynote speaker at both the New Zealand National Digital Forum and Access library technology conferences in 2012. He does not know how to explain the weird Rorschach circus that erupted following The New Aesthetic panel at SXSW 2012 but is proud to have been one of the speakers.
Aaron blogs at thisisaaronland, makes bold 140-character executive poetry on Twitter at @thisisaaronland and does not normally speak in the third person.
Aaron is happiest in the presence of olive oil.