About

I’m Irwin Chen. For almost thirty years I’ve worked in design, technology, publishing, education, and games. I’ve worked as an art director and programmer at magazines, as an information architect for social networks and newsrooms, and as a designer of visualizations for a global investigative firm. I’ve also taught interaction design to journalists.

Right now most of my time goes to research and writing. I’m working on After the Book, a multi-modal book project about orality, literacy, and what conversational AI is doing to our brains. I am doing some of my thinking in public at postliterate.org. I build the tools for that project with AI coding agents, and I write about how that works.

Background

I studied English literature at Yale, then went to the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht as a Fulbright scholar to study design. I came back to New York and joined FEED, one of the first online magazines, as art director and technologist. After that, I was a programmer at Funny Garbage and a design technologist at 2x4, where I worked on projects with AMO, Rem Koolhaas’s research office.

I ran a small interaction design consultancy, Redub, from 2008 to 2011. Clients included This American Life, ProPublica, MoMA, GOOD, and the Knight Foundation.

From 2011 to 2024 I was Director of Visualization Design at the Mintz Group, a global investigative firm. I built interactive tools to map relationship networks, untangle transaction flows, and track events across time and place in cases of fraud, corruption, and misconduct. I also led Kleptocrat, a mobile game about how corrupt public officials hide dirty money that won the IndieCade Jury Prix.

From 2014 to 2024 I was Design Lead of the Journalism + Design program at The New School, founded by Heather Chaplin. We still work together on systems research about the free press and democracy.

Consulting {#consulting}

I work independently. I take on a small number of projects in:

• Investigative visualization. Network maps, transaction timelines, and evidence graphics for investigators and legal teams.
• Financial forensics. Tracing transaction flows to look for patterns of misconduct.
• Web development. Small sites and interactive tools, built using Claude Code.

Most of this work is confidential. The anonymized case studies show the kinds of problems I solve.

Elsewhere

I co-founded Ampersand RPG, which makes tabletop role-playing games for parents and kids. I help run the Mastodon server Saturation.social. I play chess, and I’m interested in what we can learn from how neural networks play it.

I live in Brooklyn with my partner, our two sons, and a cat.

Contact {#contact}

Email irwin.chen@gmail.com. I’m also on LinkedIn and Bluesky.