September 3, 2025 — Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a novelty. It is becoming an essential ingredient in how we build, publish, and connect online. In this session, I’ll take you into my Cozy AI Kitchen to demystify how AI really works, why it matters to the WordPress ecosystem, and how builders can approach it with both curiosity and care. Rooted in my book How To Speak Machine, I’ll explore the pivotal shift we’re living through: machines that appear to “speak human.” WordPress itself has always carried a poetic tension. It was built for publishing prose, and it is powered by a community that also sees code as poetry. Now, with AI entering the picture, we face a moment where both the poetry of words and the poetry of code are being reshaped by machines. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of AI’s fundamentals and a perspective on how this evolving technology can be used not only to automate, but also to inspire creativity. AI can generate endless blog posts or even code on its own, yet its true value may be in sparking the words and the code that only you can create.

July 6, 2018 — When you look back at the history of WordPress, what distinguished WordPress was an emphasis on design. As the years passed, the definition of design changed and WordPress fell behind. How can WordPress leap ahead? The answer is inclusive design.

June 25, 2018 — When you look back at the history of WordPress, what distinguished WordPress was an emphasis on design. As the years passed, the definition of design changed and WordPress fell behind. How can WordPress leap ahead? The answer is inclusive design.

February 27, 2018 — Chris Lema talks to John Maeda

February 22, 2018 — He is the past President of Rhode Island School of Design and formerly eBay‘s Chair of their Design Advisory Board. He is also the recipient of many awards, including the Smithsonian Institution National Design Award.

August 9, 2017 — Keynote

July 31, 2017 — WordPress 4.7’s integrated REST API just gave us easy access to the public data of millions of sites. We, as designers, can now structure that data in visual ways to build creative solutions, and encourage thought. Let’s learn about APIs, how we can use them, and what we can do with the data that’s available to us from a design perspective.

December 12, 2016 — Products and services can be designed to be exclusive or inclusive — it’s a conscious choice, and it’s often about the traditional tradeoffs of quality, price, and deadlines to achieve greater margins and profitability. However, computational products and services have ushered in a new world where we can now ship products instantaneously at marginal costs close to zero — which brings unprecedented and immediate accessibility to the largest total addressable market imaginable via the Internet. It means that the nature of design needs to change, and also the way we think of *who* we are designing for needs to change. I’ve just begun this journey within the WordPress universe, and I’ll be sharing what I’ve gathered thus far on how more inclusive approaches to design are the key to better designed products and service in tech.

October 7, 2016 — Keynote for WordCamp Rhode Island 2016