Every connected system is already inside a social situation.

Design can decide what it does there.

k_o studio

Wojtek Szumowski's experience design and concept inquiry practice

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.

When we consider the techno-social situation, we may ask what a parked fleet could do for the stranger walking through a dark parking structure at night — not for its owner, who was elsewhere. The lights came on as the person approached. Triggered by presence, not ownership.

When we recognize situation as a design space, we imagine 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”, and when 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.

The most interesting design question of this moment is about relationship: what kind of participant should an adaptive, always-on system be in a person's life — and how do you design for that before the category for it fully exists?

This is the design space I work in.

k_o is my continuing inquiry — a working space, organized around the questions of relationship and participation, in motion since 2016, sustained because the questions don't stop when the institutional context changes.

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.