Eric Gordon is a professor and director of the Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact at Boston University. His research focuses on technology and institutional democracy, with a specific focus on the role of narrative, data, and algorithms on institutional trust and governance. He specializes in collaborative research and design processes and has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that help organizations transform to meet their stated values.
He is the author of over 50 articles and chapters on media and urbanism, and the author of two books on the topic: The Urban Spectator (Dartmouth, 2010) and Net Locality (Blackwell, 2011). He is the co-editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave, 2021). His most recent monograph, Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020), looks at collaborative design practices in the context of emerging technology inside government and journalism. His new book, How Institutions Listen: AI, Civic Data, and the Path Towards Public Trust, will be published by MIT Press in 2026.