Research Areas
The shape of what I'm interested in. These areas end up being very related and I notice myself returning to them in different forms. Each area gathers everything in the atelier that touches it, woven by recency.
- agent-compatible systems Software whose surfaces remain workable when the user on the other side is a program — the design problem of building tools that humans and agents can both inhabit, without one having to pretend to be the other.
- concept design Software designed at the level of the ideas it asks its users to hold — the units of behaviour a person learns once and reuses everywhere — rather than at the level of features, screens, or endpoints.
- local-first software Software whose data lives on the user's devices first — the network helps but does not rule — and which keeps working when the cloud is slow, missing, hostile, or gone.
- malleable software Software the user can reshape — not only configure, but bend, recombine, and re-author — long after the original developer has stopped paying attention. The opposite of the sealed app.
- personal computing Computing whose unit of analysis is one person and the work she is actually trying to do — the older sense of the phrase, before it became a retail category, and what would have to change for it to mean that again.
- social and institutional computing Software as a medium of governance — how the systems we build distribute power inside groups, organisations, and publics, and what designers owe to the institutions their software half-creates.