Why I experiment: my relationship to AI and XR
Why I experiment
Because behavior only tells the truth when you watch it happen, and AI and XR are where the most interesting behavior is happening now.
- Category
- Approach
- Focus
- AI, XR, behavior
- Role
- Concept, writing, sketch
- Method
- Ask, build, watch, rethink
- Status
- Always running
I don’t experiment to get away from product design. I experiment because it is the most honest way to do it. After twenty years on social networks, games, gambling, fintech and medtech, I know that a hypothesis is only an opinion until someone actually uses it, and that people rarely do exactly what they say they will.
I arrived here from two directions. Philosophy (epistemology, logic, cognitive systems) taught me to ask what we can really know. Behavioral psychology and design taught me how to find out: build the smallest real thing and watch what happens. My master’s thesis on Baudrillard’s simulacra and my PhD, Cybernette, on the performative encounter between human and artificial intelligence, from technophobia to transhumanism, are the same question asked twice. What happens to us when the thing we talk to isn’t human, and the world in front of us isn’t quite real?
Why AI
AI is the first material I have worked with that answers back. Every earlier interface was a tool; AI is a counterpart. Design stops being only about screens and becomes a question of relationship: trust, expectation, disappointment, delight. That is behavioral design in its purest form, and it is the same curiosity that made me fall in love with computers as a child, now with a computer that can surprise me.
Why XR
XR takes the interface off the glass. When the screen disappears, the room, the body and the path through it become the UI, and every assumption about navigation, attention and trust has to be tested again. I explore it one concept at a time, from an AR library wayfinder to a mindfulness space for Vision Pro to an AR smart home, each one a small experiment in how a layer of simulation changes what people do in real space.
How I experiment
Start from a human question
Not “what can the technology do?” but “what will a person feel, expect or avoid here?” Philosophy gives me the question; psychology tells me where to look.
Build the smallest real thing
A screen flow, a prototype, a few lines of code: enough that someone can actually use it, because people only reveal themselves to things that respond.
Watch, then change my mind
Observe what people and machines really do, keep what surprises me, drop what only flatters the idea, and begin the loop again.
