Austen Tucker-Crowder
AI transformation lead · program manager · agile coach · maker of things
Chicago, IL
View résumé →Writer
I write fiction and essays about work, access, technology, and the strange ways people make a life.
Read something
Four good places to enter the work.
Artist
I make art with AI. I'm a low-vision, aphantasic artist, so I'm unmoored from the visual detail of reality. I get to build my own — one shaped by memory, feeling, and the 1990s cartoons that taught me how people move.
My imagination begins with emotional geometry: who belongs beside whom, what their shapes communicate, and how it feels when they share a world.
Who I am
I'm Austen — a builder, facilitator, and professional chaos-wrangler based in Chicago. By day I lead AI enablement and transformation at ActiveCampaign, where I help teams figure out what it actually means to build an AI-first company (spoiler: it's mostly about changing how people think, not just what tools they use).
I have a background in English and rhetoric, which means I care a lot about how ideas are communicated — in meetings, in code, in documentation, and in the stories we tell ourselves about why we're doing what we're doing.
Outside of work I build personal software projects, write fiction, make things with my hands, and think too hard about board game design. This site is one of those projects.
What I do
AI Enablement
Designing the systems, curricula, and cultural scaffolding that let organizations actually use AI — not just buy it.
Facilitation
Running workshops, Worksites, and decision-forcing sessions that actually produce artifacts, not just sticky notes.
Program Management
Cross-functional coordination across engineering, product, design, and exec leadership — keeping things moving and honest.
Building
Writing code, shipping tools, and making software that I or other people actually want to use.
Interests & obsessions
- AI agents & tooling
- board game design
- fiction writing
- facilitation theory
- MCP servers
- constructivism
- accessibility
- Next.js
- Markdown publishing
- systems thinking
- Agile coaching
- Cursor IDE
- weird personal projects
- Chicago
- tabletop RPGs
About this site
The Arcades' Lab is my personal corner of the internet. It's built with Next.js 16, repository-owned Markdown, and Vercel — and it doubles as a sandbox where I try things out.
The name is about arcades in the older, weirder sense — wonder, novelty, and the cabinets crammed into the back of the room. Mine are the strange imports the owner brought in for himself: the side projects, the experiments, the games nobody asked for.
Bibliography
A few highlights from twenty years of writing under several names:
- The Painted Cat (2015, Argyll Productions / FurPlanet) — novel
- A Fuzzy Place (2013) — short story collection
- Bait and Switch (2010, Anthropomorphic Dreams) — novel
- 106 essays at The Bilerico Project (2009–2012) — LGBTQ politics, trans issues, gaming, identity
- Short fiction and poetry in Anthro magazine (2006–2007) — as Slyford T. Rabbit