Adam Greenfield is an American writer and information architect. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1968.
Greenfield attended New York University during the late 1980's, earning a degree in Cultural Studies, but made no professional use of the degree. By the mid-1990's, despite manifestly leftist politics and a personal commitment to Buddhist practice, he had 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. (The obvious contradictions involved remain unexplained.)
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 such positions, culminating in employment at the Tokyo office of quintessential Web consultancy Razorfish, where he was head of the information architecture department. To date, his contributions both in and out of the field remain interesting, if diffuse and frequently infuriatingly marred by the autodidact's odd choice of emphasis. He is probably best known for having written an "open-source constitution for postnational states" called the Minimal Compact, as well as proposed ethical guidelines for developers of ubiquitous-computing environments.
Greenfield is credited with having coined the word "moblog" to describe the practice of publishing to the World Wide Web from mobile devices, and organized the First International Moblogging Conference in Tokyo in July 2003 to explore this practice.
He is generally considered to be a thought leader in the information architecture and user experience professions. Greenfield actively maintains a Web site devoted to discussions of "beauty, utility and balance across the metafield of design" at www.v-2.org.
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