Adam Greenfield is an American writer and designer, and is the founder and managing director of urban-systems design practice Urbanscale, based in New York. From 2008 to 2010 he was Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1968.
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Greenfield graduated from New York University in 1989, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cultural Studies. In 1995, he enlisted in the United States Army's reserve component Special Operations Command as a Psychological Operations specialist, holding MOS 37F and eventually achieving the grade of Sergeant.
After leaving the Army, Greenfield took up work in the then-nascent field of information architecture for the World Wide Web, holding a succession of prominent positions culminating in employment at the Tokyo office of Razorfish, where he was head of the information architecture department.
He co-taught a class in the 2006 and 2007 academic years called Urban Computing at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program with Kevin Slavin of New York design practice area/code.
Greenfield had earlier proposed an "open-source constitution for post-national states" called the Minimal Compact, although he appears to have done little work on this project in recent years. He is also credited with having coined the word "moblog" to describe the practice of publishing to the World Wide Web from mobile devices, and having organised a conference devoted to discussing this practice in Tokyo in mid-2003.
He is generally considered to be a thought leader in the information architecture and user experience professions. Greenfield maintains a personal Web site called Speedbird. In 2010 he founded an urban-systems design practice in New York, Urbanscale, which specialises in "design for networked cities and citizens."
Greenfield is best known for his 2006 book Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing (ISBN 0-321-38401-6), which has been called "groundbreaking" by Bruce Sterling: "One puts it down with a strange conviction that web-designers have transcended geekdom and achieved Zen soulfulness."
In 2007, he co-authored the book Urban Computing and its Discontents (ISBN 978-0-9800994-0-9), which was an overview of informatics for urban environments.
He is in the process of writing his second book, the upcoming "The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing," expected in late 2011.
He resides in New York City, with his wife, artist Nurri Kim.