Josh has worked in commercial semiotics for over 20 years, generating crucial insights for marketers, strategists and planners. His background is in journalism. In the 2000s, Josh was an editor and columnist at The Boston Globe. In the ’90s, he published the zine/journal Hermenaut. He is publisher of the p(HiLo)sophical website HILOBROW.

He was described, in a New York Times profile, as a semiotician and writer who has spent decades thinking about “how a product or idea means. Not what but how.” He is co-author and editor of Taking Things Seriously and The Idler’s Glossary, among other books. He co-created the bestselling family activities guide UNBORED, as well as a line of UNBORED activity kits.

He and Rob Walker developed the object-oriented storytelling experiment Significant Objects; and they co-edit the Project:Object series exploring what (and how) inanimate objects mean.