Max Stearns

Max thrives in the messy moments, when there’s no tried-and-true path for where to go next.

Drawing on a background that merges design research and strategy with community organizing, Max applies a patient attentiveness and knack for connecting dots to turn sprawling, cross-disciplinary problems into carefully-honed questions and actionable next steps. 

Before joining us, Max built a practice of rolling up his sleeves, learning quick, and getting to work with the people around him. He’s rebuilt homes in Louisiana and dug out mudslides in Kentucky, coordinated and facilitated the City of Boston’s Urban Housing Unit Roadshow as part of the Mayor’s civic research, design, and innovation team, and co-founded errantry media lab – a design team exploring what design becomes when it goes beyond making beautiful things and becomes a way of engaging more thoughtfully in our relationships with biodiversity, technology, art, and each other.

Most recently, Max designed and tested Democracy-in-the-Loop AI across four European capitals as part of Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D); led design research and development of services and systems supporting 112 European cities pursuing climate neutrality through NetZeroCities; and co-created the Biodiversity+ Design Toolkit, a tool that was integrated into course curriculum at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

After hours, Max is likely in the kitchen, cooking something up, listening to an audiobook about the concept of time, and throwing miso into basically everything.