Situation-centric design.

Experience Design's existing vocabulary was built for a narrower relationship with technology than the one we're now living inside.

The task shrinks. The situation expands.

As adaptive AI systems are becoming more capable of handling the task itself, something genuinely new is available.
When the task gets automated, design attention doesn't disappear. It moves. Toward what was always there in the situation and never had anywhere to go: the emotions, the relations, the intentions sitting just outside the frame the task drew around itself.

Every interaction pattern was designed by someone who was paying attention to some things and not others.
The things they were not attending to are still there. They are the design space.

The task-centered paradigm takes the task as the unit of design.
The situation-centric paradigm takes the situation as the design space.

A situation is a specific moment in the social life of the connected system.
Who is here, what relations are already operating, what the system is already inside, what the person is actually experiencing at the level beneath the stated task.
The relations already operating. The emotions the task sits inside. The social life the system has entered without being asked to account for it.

Every connected system has a social layer that design has not fully entered. That layer is where the most consequential design decisions live.

This is the design space k_o works in.