About SMA

25 Years of Application

SMA was not developed in a research context. It emerged from practice. Client meetings, stakeholder reviews, design critiques, site builds and crashes, product decisions made under pressure and rarely with the luxury of being wrong. The technical foundation came from Berkeley, where computer science and fine art fought for my attention without ever fully resolving the tension between them.

The companies and client interactions where SMA was forged, slowly and without a name for what it was becoming, include Neo4j, Anthem, Callaway Golf, MetLife, Motorola, AT&T, Bristol Myers Squibb, Fortress Investments, and 1-800-Dentist, among others.

This Site as a Static SMA Implementation

The SMA site itself is an example of the decoupling of information architecture from interface rendering. The full paper is stored as structured JSON, allowing individual chapters and content sections to render dynamically based on user navigation, without relying on a traditional database layer.

By structuring and tagging content semantically inside a static site architecture, the same underlying information graph can project different experiences depending on context, declared intent, or avatar-driven filtering, while also functioning fully in a headless mode.

This allows a traditionally static brochure-style site to behave more like a dynamic semantic system, surfacing different content relationships and priorities without changing the underlying source structure.

Because SMA operates at the semantic contract layer, the framework remains platform agnostic. It can sit above modern CMS platforms, proprietary publishing systems, structured APIs, or custom application layers, as long as meaning can travel alongside the signal.