Joshua McVeigh-Schultz is a hybrid ethnographer, design researcher, and media maker who recently earned a PhD from the Media Arts and Practice PhD program in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. His research intersects fields of HCI, anthropology, media studies, and design theory, and his dissertation explores the intersection between ritual and design. In 2013, he won an Intel PhD Fellowship for his dissertation research. At MSR New England he studied the role of affordances in a microsocial relationship app, Couple. At Intel Labs’ Interaction Experience Research group (IXR), he researched youth and mobile media and developed UX insights for mobile play. For his dissertation, he explored the intersection between ritual and design in a range of contexts: civic participation, interpersonal communication, and human-object relationship formation. He earned an MFA at UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts & New Media program and also completed an MA in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, where he researched identity performance in Japanese social media. As an undergraduate he completed a BA in anthropology from the University of Chicago. At USC he worked as a designer in Scott Fisher’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab, designing speculative interfaces for creative collaboration in VR (among other topics). He has also been a researcher for the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, a member of Henry Jenkins’s Civic Paths research group, and a contributor to the academic blog Culture Digitally. Between his undergraduate and graduate careers, he lived, studied, and taught in Japan and China.