Every connected system is already inside a social situation.

Design can decide what it does there.

I came to design from sociology, and from poetry.

Not as supplementary skills. As the method.
Sociology finds what is operating in a situation beneath what is visible.
Poetry finds the image that makes it available to be felt.
Design makes it concrete enough to build toward.

Together they produce a specific quality of attention.
They are the same inquiry, conducted in different registers. They converge through all my work,
as one instrument for designing the emotional and relational situations that a product or system can invite in a human life.

Situation-centric design practice.

A car's side mirror rests facing inward, toward an absent driver. The street outside, the people walking past, the life happening around it: not its concern. The car was designed for one relationship. The situation it sits inside contains many others.

This is where I start.

The gap between what a connected system currently does and what the situation it inhabits actually contains. I call this the surplus of social possibility. It is always there. Design finds it.

A parked vehicle whose side mirror turns outward produces a different social presence: the vehicle is no longer facing entirely away from the life around it.
That's the whole gesture, and it's enough to shift what kind of object it feels like it is — closed and private, or quietly attentive to the street it sits on.

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 become more capable of handling the task itself, design attention doesn't disappear. It moves toward what was always 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.

The situation-centric paradigm takes the situation as the design space. Not the task. Not the user in isolation. The full social moment the system is already inside.

We can ask what a parked vehicle could do for the stranger walking through a dark parking structure at night — not for its owner, who was elsewhere. The lights came on softly for the person moving through a shared space. Triggered by presence, not ownership. Nothing is asked. The lights simply attend to the situation they are in.

We can imagine a car with a bicycle bell instead of a horn — because a horn carries the grammar of a private vehicle asserting priority: Move. Out of my way. When a car approaches a bicycle, the situation requires something closer to: I see you. Take your time.

These are not features. They are the form a design proposition takes when the situation is the starting point.

The situation contains more than the task. A system that attends to it — that is present to its full social context rather than only waiting for the next command — becomes a different kind of participant in the life around it.

Participant. Not tool. Not assistant. The word carries a different design obligation.

This is the design space I work in.

This is my working space, a continuing inquiry, organized around the questions of relationship and participation.

The work shown here is its record: specific propositions, real projects, a body of thinking developed across connected mobility, healthcare, public space, and AI interaction design.

The inquiry is open.

I am looking for the next context where this way of seeing finds its most useful home.