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Two knowledge systems in a room, one human and one machine, both getting better because the other one is there. That's the version I want.
The industry is optimizing for what you do next. The machine is learning too, but from a thumbs-up which is the thinnest thing a person can say. Optimize on that and you get a system that agrees with you. Are we designing for the part where both of you end up knowing more?
That's what humane by construction means to me.
Consent, time, reasoning, and imagination aren't ethics bolted on afterward. They're the conditions under which people produce anything worth learning from. Rushed tricked or bored people teach a model nothing.
If showing up counted as much as donating, would more people show up?
Neighbors donate, volunteer, or bring supplies. Every contribution fills a tile, and the neighborhood changes one tile at a time. Companion to my MFA thesis :
The Effects of the Internet and Civic Engagement, 2012
SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design)
What can you leave at home if the place has it, and someone there can tell you where?
Live weather, local events, and what people are actually wearing, contributed by locals and by travelers who paid attention. Pack lighter, buy the one thing you need from a shop someone recommends, and leave a note for whoever comes next.
Can you see through the noise?
Rhetorical pressure seems to be more legible than factual accuracy, and far less contested. Two issues were assembled by hand before any of it was automated.
Can a team feel the cost of designing for someone they've never met?
You get a brief, a persona, and a wall of beautiful parts with price tags. Most people build something gorgeous and wrong, then see what everyone else built for the same brief. The only way out is to ask the customer, which is the point.
What if you could only see it by showing up?
The latest collection stays hidden online. It reveals itself when you go offline, stand near the booutique at kura Hulanda or hold a code. Proximity grants 48hr of access, then the door closes. Presemce is the machanic. Similar to the unit-e project in a different environment.
A bespoke and in person customer experience solution.
Collaborating with local developers to cmplete the inperson and personalization experience for norehearsal.co
Questions I keep coming back to, in my own work and when a team invites me into theirs. None of them are settled. I have better versions of them than I used to.
Something is genuinely good about people striving toward something together. I don't think that stops applying just because one of the participants is a machine. Two knowledge systems in a room, one human and one machine, both getting better because the other one is there. That's the version I want.
When it goes missing is when you notice it. Focus is supposed to help, but the tighter the tasks get, the more complete each person's view of them feels, and the less anyone is holding the whole. Then a disagreement arrives and there's nothing above it to appeal to, so it becomes about taste, or about seniority, or about each other.
The rift looks like a personality problem. Most of the time the story just went missing.Working with a model goes wrong the same way. Hand it a task with no sense of what any of it is for and it optimizes for the nearest measurable thing, which is how you end up with an answer shaped like a thumbs-up.This is usually where we end up. Back at the beginning, at what the company said it was for and what it said it valued, and then at the last handful of design decisions, asking whether those two things still recognize each other. It's rarely that the story is gone. It's noticing that nothing anyone is doing this week is still attached to it.
This is one of the questions I keep coming back to, in my own work or when invited to evaluate product design solutions at scale.
The tools change every few months. The models change faster. Whatever a team learned to build with last year is already being replaced, and it's easy to feel that keeping up is the whole job. But the person at the end of it hasn't changed. They're still the reason anyone builds anything, and they're still where every product experience finishes, whether it was made by hand or by a model in an afternoon. Speed changes how you get there. It doesn't change who you're getting to.That's what proximity is for. Not a handbrake, but the one fixed point to steer by while everything else moves.
The fear is that grounding work in real people makes it cautious. What I've seen goes the other way. A team that can point to what it heard gets to try bolder things, because the bold idea finally has a reason behind it. Without that, every ambitious option is one opinion against another, and the safe one wins.
Open question: Is this true everywhere, or only in teams that already trust each other.
Automate the distance, never the contact. Let tools do the sorting, the summarizing, the first drafts, the volume. Keep the conversation itself, deciding what a contradiction means, noticing who isn't in the data, and taste. It's less a rule about what AI can do and more about what a team forgets how to do if it stops doing it.
Open Question: Whether that line holds as the tools get better at listening, or whether it just moves.
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Design is an art before it's a service. Something happens when you make a thing with your own hand: information stops being information and becomes a decision you can feel is just right. It's the fastest and most reliable judgment anyone has, and it's the reason a maker knows a line or cut is wrong before they can explain why.
A large language model can describe pride. It can tell you what it's for, when it appears, what it does to a human. It has never felt the thing that happens when a stitch comes out right. I don't think that's a flaw to design around. It's the clear division of labor. One half can articulate, the other half can feel, and neither is much good at the other's job.
Speed is fine. Tools are fine. I use them for the parts that are legible, so there's more room for the part that isn't. What I don't want is a definition of winning that only counts the half a machine can describe, because that's the half that can't tell you whether any of it was worth making.
They run through the experiments too. whattowear.in gives each city its own agent that would rather say not yet than borrow another place's answer. Unit-e counts showing up. FallacyBot was run by hand before any of it was automated.
Experimenting with Gen AI tools to create a series of short films.
A story I first created a decade ago is now coming to life through the latest in emerging tech. This project is a direct result of curiosity and commitment to adapting to a quickly evolving landscape. A short Story 10 years in the making Created by Stephanie Hasham and synapses and written and expanded by Mame Bougouma Diene.
I am a also a multidisciplinary freelancer with over a decade of experience in the digital space. My studio provides comprehensive services for a select number of projects at a time, including illustration, tech consulting, branding, and web design. I leverage my deep knowledge to help clients build a compelling brand and a robust digital presence from concept to launch
Roba Alma is an award winning short film currently making its rounds in the European and Caribbean Film festival circuit. Directed by: Elizabeth Francisco - Adobe Illustrator
FML is a brand new party game for people who are simply over it, tired of the whole thing and looking for others who understand that. Design new website and ecommerce store setup and brand extension with CTA links to amazon.com up 14.89k sessions
Developing concepts, research, and protoyping for an IoT Pill Dispenser Bot
Together we will learn techniques used by global foresight practitioners, collaborate and explore timely topics, spark the imagination, and create a unique XR artifact of possible futures.
