Hi, I’m Stef
I’m a designer, software developer and startup person. My work focusses on playful approaches to technology and its cultural, social and political applications.
I playfully hack on things that matter and live by the maxim “create something every day”.
“Things that matter” is a catch-all for projects and concepts that I find challenging, creatively interesting and will result in some kind of positive outcome for someone. It’s pretty diverse, but I am working on (or have recently worked on) projects around democracy, culture, open data, live-hacking, visualisations, social entrepreneurship, charitable giving, music, accessibility, education, sport, health, transparency and citizen journalism.
Most recently I co-founded Aframe, a cloud-based video production platform, as the technical founder, helped grow the company from two to over thirty staff, saw it through $10m of private investment and on to expansion in North America.
Prior to that I undertook a Clore Leadership Fellowship, sponsored by the Cultural Leadership Programme, having previously been more-or-less simultaneously involved in a boutique web agency, a record label Type, a creative industries membership organisation, and a number of experimental startup projects and festivals. Along the way I’ve been lucky enough to be part of some great teams and won a handful of awards.
On exiting Aframe my work can be summed up as “playfully hacking on things that matter” through my company More Monsters, where I’m working on diverse projects and collaborations involving an array of tangental areas of interest: open data, education, extreme sports, charity, democracy, hack days, rapid innovation projects, applying agile approaches to digital cultural innovation and using “the hack” as a method for exploring new ideas by “sketching with code”.
Day-to-day I mainly use Ruby/JQuery/HTML5/etc. for code, Illustrator for design, and agile processes for the startup approach. Think “Hack, Play, Learn” leading on to “Build, Measure, Learn”.
Over the next year I’m focussing on researching, exploring and experimenting with new ideas, developing new applications through collaborations with the aim of probably throwing myself into an exciting “just do one thing” project by early 2013. I don’t know what it’ll be yet, but that’s the point.
My wife Emily Quinton is a successful London wedding photographer and in my spare time I help her with the digital side of her business, as well as doing a fair amount of photography too.
I’m a father of three young kids and enjoy spending my spare time at hack days, drawing monsters, doing photography, making mixes, spending far too much time on Twitter and generally keeping up to date with the latest trends and thinking about “what’s next?”
If you’d like to work with me in some way, or just fancy a chat, get in touch.
This biog is also available in the third person.