Humanity does not end where technology begins
More and more tasks can be handed over to systems: searching, explaining, writing, planning, analyzing, and executing work.
Yet the mere availability of capabilities does not indicate where to go.
We are interested in the person beside them. What do they dare to try? What do they begin to understand better? What do they break free from? What do they stop doing, and do they notice these shifts?
Capabilities and Freedom
Technology frees up time, but does not define what is missing in life.
It offers answers and helps express thoughts, yet it does not replace understanding and individual intent.
Outcomes are not predetermined. Both the tool itself and how it becomes integrated into life matter.
Assistance and Human Dignity
We do not have to do everything alone.
Support, other people’s knowledge, and assistive technologies enable communication, learning, work, and personal choice.
We distinguish interaction that preserves human influence from interaction that diminishes it. Independence and assistance do not oppose each other.
Right to One’s Own Pace
A person has the right to be slow, to not know, to get tired, to rest, to doubt, and to change their mind.
Time freed from work does not have to become a new project of self-optimization. We do not design an ideal human for a technological future.
Creating and Testing
Does learning from a simulation carry over into real work?
Does a tool give a team more mutual understanding, or does it add new mechanisms of control?
Does a creative system help find an authentic voice, or does it reproduce the path of least resistance?
We must be able to prove our own hypothesis wrong, spot undesirable outcomes, and modify what we built. Otherwise, a lab turns into marketing for its own beliefs.
Working Between Experience and Technology
We strive to understand technology well enough to work with its possibilities, and listen to human experience carefully enough not to confuse capabilities with human needs.
We translate experience into design questions, observations into research, and principles into concrete decisions.
We design interaction patterns with technology in which individuals retain the right to shape their own lives.