Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) has a rare collection of oracle bones (jiagu), the earliest known example of writing in East Asia. This collection is already well-known to scholars, but it is currently kept in off-site storage, where it is largely inaccessible. Working with CMNH staff, I have registered as an Research Associate in the Anthropology collection and hired a few ETC students to conduct initial research and design a few prototypes, building the groundwork for a future collaborative project.

One of the candidates for "first video game" is the Nimatron, which was designed in Pittsburgh by Westinghouse Research for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Designed to play the ancient game Nim, the Nimatron is important to the history of both games and artificial intelligence -- the ancestor of Deep Blue and AlphaGo. Pittsburgh's Heinz History Center hosts the Westinghouse archives and has provided documentation about the machine's design and construction. However, I'm still pondering what form a Nimatron project might take.

Meadville PA, 1.5 hours north of Pittsburgh, was formerly the headquarters of the Keystone View Company -- the leading U.S. producer of stereoscopic images and viewers. This project is in early development, but I hope to take a group of students to visit the Johnson-Shaw Stereoscopic Museum and ponder the connection between stereoscopic viewers and contemporary XR headsets.

Pittsburgh is home to the "World Championship of Pogo," a.k.a. Pogopalooza, where a group of dedicated athletes perform incredible tricks on powerful, pneumatic pogo sticks. I've been doing background research and hope that we can do a project on extreme pogo in the near future.

Panoptifox is an ongoing research project, initially started in January 2020, that examines the largely forgotten history of the North American fox farming industry (1880s-1940s). It is particularly focused on efforts to raise genetically rare silver-black colored red foxes (vulpes vulpes) in literal panopticon-shaped pens.

The circular, panoptic ranch design was promoted by the U.S. Silver Fox Farms company -- with ranches in Spokane WA, Minneapolis MN, and Shasta Springs CA -- and also by Frank Getz Ashbrook, the head of the U.S. Fur Animal Experiment Station in Saratoga Springs NY.

Commercial fox farming originated in Canada on Prince Edward Island but became a speculative investment bubble in the early 20th century before declining with WWII.

As an indie designer, I learned my trade, in large part, by enthusiastically participating in game jams. However, after reading Lilly Irani's critical analysis of Silicon Valley-style hackathons and related research, I've become concerned about game jams (and educational activities structured as game jams) continuing to be the primary means of learning how to make games. At the moment, I'm pondering the right venue to articulate these concerns.