These are notes from an ongoing inquiry into how people and technology relate to each other — and into what design can do when that relationship is still being formed.
They are not finished positions.
They are thinking made visible, offered in the spirit in which the rest of this site is offered: as an open invitation to the conversation.
Conversation about how to put this world back together in an equitable and resilient ways.
We are in a period when the relationship between people and technology is still being shaped — by AI, by connected systems, by platforms that are becoming participants in daily life before anyone has asked what kind of participants they should be.
That question is the most interesting design question of this moment.
It is what k_o studio is built around. And it is what I am looking for the right context to pursue next.
What language are we designing in
I grew up in another language. I think in Polish and English simultaneously, which means I am always slightly aware of the gap between the word I have and the thing it could mean.
Moving between languages taught me that no single vocabulary contains everything. The word that seems to settle a question in one language reveals, in translation, that it was settling it only within that language. The situation stays open.
A Continuing Atelier - a studio update
k_o is an open atelier — a continuing mode of inquiry and concept prototyping, maintaining the intellectual practice because the practice is worth maintaining, and looking for the next context where this way of seeing finds its most useful home.
Poets of connected world
A poem does not describe what is there. It finds the image that holds what is there. The specific detail that makes the reader feel something the situation contains but does not announce.
This is also what experience design does.
In-between narratives
We are in-between stories, in-between narratives, organizing how we make sense of the world we live in, and in-between discourses framing the roles technology can play in human experience. The omnipresent old narrative - technology as a passive, waiting to be used tool - is losing its ability to inspire the future and is holding back new possibilities for how people and technology can co-participate in experience.
Techno-social situation
Techno-social situation is an experience design space where technology starts to participate in context of social relations, beyond isolated tasks, inviting moments of magic and purpose to everyday context.
From automation to autonomy
Our relationship with technology is expanding.
We interact with digital objects that are less like passive, waiting to be used tools and more like networked, always-on, responsive entities that receive input from the world around them, not just from a single user. Our relationship with them can no longer be fully understood through one-to-one functions of a tool.
Prototyping experience
Experience prototyping is less a set of techniques than it is an attitude and sensibility, inviting us to imagine possibilities of new relations that product or system can participate in.
Social Imagination
Every situation contains more than its current design reveals.