Zach Kaiser

Biography

Zachary Kaiser (he/him) is an educator, writer, designer, artist, union organizer, DJ, and music producer. He is currently Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University.

Zach’s research and creative practice address the politics of technology as enacted through the interfaces to digital products and services. He is the author of Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), an interdisciplinary artist-scholar monograph that examines the role of UX design in legitimizing and circulating the dangerous idea of humans as computers. He also regularly exhibits his creative practice nationally and internationally, including a commissioned work about Artificial Intelligence, titled Blessed is The Machine, for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI). Zach is also the former Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Art, Art History, and Design’s interdisciplinary MFA program. He also is the former chair of the CAA Committee on Design, and the former secretary of the Design Studies Forum.

In 2006, Zach graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BS in Studio Art, and, in 2013, he earned his MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan State, he co-founded Skeptic, a Boston-based research and design collective, and served as a visiting lecturer in various design programs in Boston.