Thinking

We are social animals. Our instincts for trust, attachment, and empathy were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. To allow community and society. That wiring hasn't changed. What has changed is everything around us.

The world we live in now is largely artificial. We dismantled the meaning of space and time and connected everyone and everything at once. We barely can control what reaches us and what the world knows about us. It's no longer a decision of technology, but of design to what and to whom we connect. And this decision is as much about enabling, as limiting the outreach. Design for privacy in an artificial and borderless world is a priority job for designers.

But technology is about to change its face again. It's no longer awkward buttons and forms. It's getting an empathic and emotional interface. These new things that trigger our social instincts aren't human. But they trigger our instincts and behaviours, as they would be. We might adapt and tell the difference over time, but the systems on the other side are optimised to keep us engaged more than ever. Making machines more empathetic, while maintaining human agency, is now the eminent design challenge. Designing the influence on human behaviour and decisions, while interacting with agentic systems that don't risk anything, while humans risk all. Interacting with systems, that are perceived to be friendly and helpful, but follow an adversarial agency.

The most consequential design decisions are the ones nobody notices, because they focus on the effect, not the surface. Whether personal data is hoarded or private by default. Do we become empowered or dependent from a technology? Is the human nature considered or exploited? Is the measure of success engagement or wellbeing? All these are design questions and while they seem to be very large, they help understanding the systemic impact of each new interaction, product or service.

I design for humans living in an artificial world. I put us humans, with all our instincts, vulnerabilities, and needs, into the focal point of my actions and decisions.

Next, you may want to learn how I work.