Ted Byfield is a Visiting ISP Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the Communication Design and Technology Department of Parsons the New School for Design, New School University. He holds a BA in Ancient Studies from Columbia University.
Ted worked for over a decade as a freelance book editor for academic and public-interest publishers including Cambridge University Press, the Dia Center for the Arts, the New Press, Scribner/Macmillan, and Zone Books. He has served as an editor of ICANN Watch, as co-moderator of the Nettime mailing list including co-editing two of its proceedings, README! (1999) and NKPVI (2001), and co-organized several conferences, notably Tulipomania (2000), blur_02 (2002), and the Next 5 Minutes 4 (2003).
His writings on subjects ranging from space photography to internet governance have appeared in publications as diverse as First Monday, Frieze, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Mute magazine; and he has consulted for the BBC, The Kitchen, the Open Society Institute, and the Waag Society for Old and New Media, among others. Awards and honors Ted has received include contributing to the winner of the 1997 Rotterdam Design Prize, a 2002 Design Trust for Public Space Fellowship in Journalism, a 2003 grant from the Open Society Institute, and contributor in the 2003-2004 Social Science Research Council's Information Technology and International Cooperation workgroup.
Current areas of interest include the etymology of words central to describing the rise of ICT-oriented cultures, the ways in which social discourses are expressed through technical interfaces, alternatives to privacy, and critical perspectives on data visualization.