Aza Raskin


Aza Raskin is co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and Earth Species Project. He is also a writer, entrepreneur, inventor, and interface designer. He is the son of human-computer interface expert and initiator of the Macintosh project at Apple, Jef Raskin.
As an advocate for the ethical use of technology, Raskin is critical of the effects that modern technology has on everyday lives and society. Along with Tristan Harris, Raskin has extensively talked about the powers and potential dangers that technology poses to modern society in the podcast Your Undivided Attention. In 2019, he became a member of the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council.
Raskin also coined the phrase "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach," which was the title of an article that he wrote with Renee Diresta. "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" has become a defining term to understand the large scale implications of platform amplification and free speech. The phrase has been publicly quoted by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey when banning political advertisements on Twitter.
Raskin has been noted for continuing his father's work in project Archy, for working as head of user experience at Mozilla Labs and lead designer for Firefox, and for founding various start-up companies. Raskin is also known for inventing the infinite scroll. More recently, he has collaborated on virtual reality projects and zooming user interface.

Career

Personal projects

Aza Raskin gave his first talk on user interfaces at age 10 at the local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI. He holds bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Chicago.
In 2004, he worked with his father Jef Raskin at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces on Archy, a user interface paradigm. The next year, he founded Humanized Inc. to continue work on the Archy paradigm. At Humanized, he created the language-based service-oriented Enso software.
During the devastating earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, Raskin mobilized with a group of other entrepreneurs, to create a crowdsourced website to turn real-time information streams into meaningful map data, used by several major non-governmental organizations helping on the ground in Haiti hosted at Haiti.com.
Raskin is an active phishing researcher, best known for discovering the tabnabbing attack. The attack takes advantage of open browser tabs to launch phishing sites without the user's knowledge.
He has a number of smaller projects like Algorithm Ink which generates art from a formal grammar.
Raskin advocated for iterative governance in the Rebooting Britain series of Wired UK magazine, and was also on its cover. He has also given a TED talk about new humane directions for computing.

Mozilla Corporation

In 2008, Humanized employees including Raskin were part of a hire-out by the Mozilla Corporation. In 2010, Raskin was appointed Creative Lead for Firefox, having previously been head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. He has worked on several labs projects including Ubiquity, Firefox for mobile, and wrote the original specification for the Geolocation API.
In 2010, Raskin introduced the results of his work on the Firefox team at Mozilla: Tab Candy. Organizing tabs spatially, Tab Candy allowed the user to "organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand".
Tab Candy's initial design and alpha release has been called "the best new browser feature since tabs were invented" by Computerworld. Tab Candy was later renamed Firefox Panorama and hidden by default in the initial Firefox 4 release. Panorama was moved to an add-on and removed from Firefox.

Startups

Raskin has founded two other companies besides Humanized, including Songza, a music meta-search tool, and Bloxes, which sold furniture made out of cardboard. Songza was acquired in late 2008 by Amazon-backed Amie Street. Songza was eventually bought by Google and now powers much of Google Play. Songza was also responsible for mood and activity-based playlists.
By the end of 2010, Raskin announced he had left Mozilla to begin a health-related venture at the Massive Health startup, with the goal to apply design principles to the problem of being healthy. In 2011, he received the Master of Design award from Fast Company for his work as co-founder of Massive Health. On April 16, 2012, Massive Health announced that Raskin would lead the company as Chief Vision Officer. Massive Health was acquired by Jawbone in 2013.

Earth Species Project

In 2017, Raskin founded the Earth Species Project, an open-source collaborative and nonprofit dedicated to decoding animal communication that launched with an NPR Invisibilia podcast in 2020.

Opinions on technology use

As one of the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, Raskin has been an advocate for the ethical use of technology, and is critical of the effects that modern technology has on everyday lives and society. He has also given talks on the far-reaching and often negative effects of modern technology use for Wired magazine and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Bits & Pretzels, Slush, Humanity 2.0, and Laurie Segall.
In 2019, Raskin became a member of the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council.

Media and other activities

Raskin was featured on the cover of Off Screen magazine in 2018. In 2019, he was included in The Art of Curiosity, the Exploratorium's 50th anniversary book. As a multimedia artist who has collaborated with various artists, he was also a guest curator for Ars Electronica's 40th anniversary in 2019, and has exhibited his artwork at an exhibition about North and South Korea.
Raskin has been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30, and was also one of the "Most Creative People" featured by Fast Company.
In April 2020, Raskin was interviewed on a podcast with Laurie Segall speaking about the long-term affects of tech and the digital age during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Personal life

Aza Raskin married Wendellen Li in August 2015. The couple has since divorced.

Citations

Writing