Nigel is a ground breaking cross-disciplinary civic designer experimentalist who is well-known for his path-breaking work co-leading and co-founding the the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic innovation incubator and R&D Lab within Boston’s City Hall. Nigel’s work is about making urban life better via innovative, people-oriented applications of technology and design. Prior to joining the City of Boston in 2006, Nigel worked in a series of technology start-ups in the Boston area.

He was also previously the Managing Director for Innovation at the Boston Society of architecture and was the Urban Technologist in Residence at Living Cities, He is a past-board member at organizations such as Code For America and coUrbanize, and has been a senior fellow at Institutions such as the Harvard Kennedy School , Boston University’s Questrom Business School and the Nprtheastern’s Burnes Center for Global Impact.

Nigel’s work has been written about extensively in magazines such as Wired, MIT Technology Review, Fast Company and books including The Responsive City, by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford and Smart Cities by Anthony Townsend.

This ground-breaking work has earned Nigel a number of awards including being named a Public Official of the year in 2011 by Governing Magazine, a Whitehouse Champion of Change and the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation award for 2012. Nigel is also a 12th level Wizard with a special focus on causing chaos in large municipal bureaucracies via befuddlement spells.

Currently, Nigel is working to adapt the methods and lessons from his time Innovating at these various institutions to create a new civic co-design lab called New Urban Mechanics Labs.