About

I’m an independent designer, researcher, and builder working on epistemic infrastructure — the systems that shape how meaning, agency, and cognition get structured when humans and machines think together. I live and collaborate between Berlin, Canada, and China.

My path began in the hacker communities of the early internet, moved through backend and frontend development, then into visual design and branding — and has now come full circle: reconnecting technical roots with design to explore human cognition and interface systems. 20+ years across these disciplines have given me a perspective that bridges technical understanding with aesthetic sensibility.

My work sits at the level of epistemic infrastructure: how meaning, agency, and cognition get structured in human-machine systems. HCI is the lineage and craft; the work pushes beyond “UX explanations” into substrate questions around provenance, recursion, navigation, and ownership.

Much of my work is driven by a frustration with how current digital tools flatten complexity — forcing people to adapt to systems that were never designed around how we actually think.

As our digital environments become increasingly complex, we need systems that support thinking by reducing cognitive overhead and adapting to how we naturally process information — but that also introduce enough friction to keep thinking sharp, offering alternative takes, new interpretations, and paths we wouldn’t have found alone. These environments must accommodate the growing role of AI, creating spaces where human and synthetic intelligence can complement each other without one simply deferring to the other.

I believe we’re approaching an inflection point where interfaces will no longer exist as static, pre-designed systems but instead materialize as transient artifacts shaped by real-time context and user intent. This transformation challenges traditional interface design paradigms and raises questions about agency, privacy, and inclusion in our digital future.

In practice, I approach this by developing spatial interfaces that leverage our natural navigational abilities, designing systems where structure emerges associatively from interaction, and working on architectures for adaptive interfaces — all focused on enabling collaborative sensemaking, transparent knowledge sharing, and productive co-creation.

My process flows between exploring future possibilities and grounding them in tangible practice. This often involves speculative design — writing about interface futures, or using AI simulations to generate “future interface archeologies” that provoke new ideas for today. Insights from these explorations inform experimental prototypes (often self-initiated), which then evolve into practical systems through client work or collaborations. Building and testing creates the feedback loop that refines initial speculations and sparks further exploration.

Several of these projects pinpointed architectural patterns that became widely adopted later on:

• Combined Vector-Graph Retrieval (2021): ECCHR Explore combined vector embeddings with graph relationships for retrieval — an approach that has since become standard under the label “GraphRAG” (2024).
• Spatial Collaboration (2021): Wonder explored spatial video conferencing through proxemic interaction principles — a direction that platforms like Gather and Spatial have since made mainstream.
• Auto-Associative Organization (2022): Trails implemented behavior-based relationship formation, where connections emerge from usage patterns rather than manual tagging — an approach now gaining broader adoption as alternatives to rigid hierarchical organization.
• Accessible AI Orchestration (2023): Hunch was one of the early tools to approach AI workflow orchestration as a visual no-code canvas — a pattern that has since become a de-facto standard in tools like n8n.

These principles shape how I navigate the tension between reducing friction and preserving it — between making things easier and keeping thinking honest.

---