August 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Software Should Have Corners
A ferry lounge has more nuanced privacy settings than most software. What seating areas reveal about social distance, territory, navigation, and designing behavior without commanding it.
HAAM Notes / Topic
Interaction Design
61 notes follow this idea through the HAAM archive.
August 16, 2026 · 24 min read
China Has Apps for Things We Still Call Society
A field atlas of the Chinese software operating families, workers, merchants, markets, mobility, desire, and the state, and what changes when an app becomes an institution.
August 16, 2026 · 6 min read
Failure Mode
Why calling something a failure mode turns an individual mistake into evidence about the system, and why that can reveal design or hide responsibility.
August 15, 2026 · 9 min read
Bumble Gave Me More Time and Somehow It Feels Dead
Bumble stretched its match timer from 24 to 72 hours. The change may improve conversation completion while quietly removing the urgency that made a match feel like an event.
August 14, 2026 · 6 min read
288 Words
TSMC published a tiny English vocabulary for technicians. It looks like a word list until it starts to reveal the factory, the interface, and an older agreement between humans and machines.
August 5, 2026 · 11 min read
Before I Asked, I Was Going to Do It
AI can give us more knowledge, more options, and more reasons to wait. What happens when better advice raises the threshold for ordinary action?
June 2019 archive · Published August 13, 2026 · 7 min read
At EMERGE HACK 2019, We Tried to Design for Friendship
In Minsk, 60 people had 36 hours to prototype pieces of the future. I worked on Realy, an early attempt to use software for something social platforms are strangely bad at: helping people build real friendship.
August 11, 2026 · 8 min read
The AI Gave the Website a 6/10. I Asked Who Taught It Taste.
I asked AI to review a Finnish cultural website. The useful part was not the score, but discovering the invisible idea of good design behind it.
August 11, 2026 · 8 min read
The Button Was Never Just a Button
AI agents are giving ordinary people executive-level delegation power without the operational experience that used to come before it. The next AI interface may need to make complexity legible without making us manage the work ourselves.
August 3, 2026 · 22 min read
A Deleted Message Is Still a Message
An unsend button can remove a database object. It cannot reverse delivery, notification, interpretation or memory. Designing deletion means deciding who controls a conversation after it has happened.
August 3, 2026 · 8 min read
The New Aesthetics Will Not Be Prompted
Patrick Collison's Book of Kells experiment shows the difference between recovering a visual style and rebuilding the cultural systems that give beauty meaning.
July 31, 2026 · 9 min read
Healthcare Only Exists When Insurance Can Read It
A therapy session can happen and help a patient, yet remain financially unreal until it has been translated into the codes, evidence and permissions an insurer accepts.
July 30, 2026 · 6 min read
The Product Is a Decoy
Many businesses make money from something slightly different from what they appear to sell. The visible product is often the mechanism that accumulates the real asset.
July 30, 2026 · 4 min read
The Fastest Machines in History Are Stuck Waiting
The AI race looks like a competition for more GPUs, but some of the fastest machines in history are still limited by memory, coordination and waiting.
July 30, 2026 · 8 min read
There Is No Computer Anymore
A modern device is a coordinated organization of CPUs, GPUs, neural processors, signal processors and tiny controllers. Software design increasingly means deciding which machine receives each part of the work.
July 29, 2026 · 11 min read
The Product Happens Between the Screens
Interaction design has strong tools for screens, flows and journeys. Interaction sequence maps can expose the hidden choreography of users, interfaces, sensors, services, AI and human recovery.
July 29, 2026 · 8 min read
The URL Is the Product’s Public Memory
A screen shows the product for a moment. A URL preserves its objects, state, position and history, making the experience shareable, revisitable and legible to people, browsers and agents.
July 29, 2026 · 7 min read
Your STI Test Could Unlock a Dating Profile
Dating profiles reveal almost everything except the information that becomes relevant when two people decide to become intimate. Laboratory-verified health data could become a reciprocal permission layer instead of another static badge.
July 29, 2026 · 5 min read
The Checkout Robot Accused Me Before I Started Shopping
A self-checkout machine mistook an empty shopping bag for an unscanned product because it had already decided the setup phase was over. The error reveals how automation turns ordinary human variation into exception work.
July 29, 2026 · 5 min read
Every Wrinkle Has a Cause
A pillow is a small argument between filling, fabric, seams and gravity. Learning to draw one means learning to see the invisible forces beneath a visible form.
July 29, 2026 · 11 min read
Two AIs Fought Over Who Gets to Apply for My Job
One AI carefully tailored my application. Another appeared on top of the form, ready to submit its own version without asking. Job hunting has become a fight between competing agents.
July 29, 2026 · 13 min read
What Kind of Worker Is AI Allowed to Become?
Asana, ClickUp, Linear, Notion, Atlassian, Microsoft and monday.com are not building the same AI teammate. Their interfaces are quietly deciding whether AI becomes a colleague, delegate, automation, specialist network or outside worker.
July 29, 2026 · 16 min read
The Agent Becomes Real When It Can Pay
AI agents become economically consequential when they can hold a budget, purchase tools, hire other agents and commit scarce resources. The wallet turns software from a tool into a customer, employer and tiny organization.
July 27, 2026 · 10 min read
The Shopping List Is Becoming a Constitution
A grocery agent does not merely build a basket. It turns budget, values, substitutions and commercial loyalties into a permission system that decides what becomes visible and whose interests the software serves.
July 27, 2026 · 9 min read
The Copy Button Is Missing
Language models can reason through difficult problems and still corrupt a string while copying it. The failure reveals where AI products need deterministic software, visible provenance and a harness around the model.
August 24, 2026 · 8 min read
Lived Experience Is a Local System Log
My grandmother called every day. My mother's phone never rang. Both were telling the truth. An iPad in another city reveals how invisible routing makes software write stories about other people's intentions.
August 3, 2026 · 11 min read
We Need AI That Helps Us Remain Makers
AI is not only automating work. It is beginning to automate making itself, one of the oldest ways humans experience agency, growth, belonging, and meaning.
July 27, 2026 · 11 min read
The Report Is a Form
A licensed analyst report looks like content. In the interface it becomes a machine for turning anonymous research into qualified demand.
July 27, 2026 · 8 min read
An App Too Small to Exist
Apple can now generate a Safari extension from a description. The stranger shift is that useful software no longer needs a market, a name, or a reason to become a permanent product.
July 25, 2026 · 9 min read
The App Has Received Your Uncertainty
Why apps acknowledge the tap but hide what happens next, and how silent interfaces transfer operational uncertainty from companies to users.
July 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Now I’m Limited by What I Can Imagine
AI has made implementation cheap enough that code is no longer my main bottleneck. The harder limit is deciding what a product should do and which ideas deserve to exist.
July 25, 2026 · 12 min read
When Systems Teach Us Not to Try
Learned helplessness is usually treated as a problem inside a person. What changes when interfaces, institutions, and opaque feedback loops help produce it?
July 24, 2026 · 9 min read
The Interface That Wants You to Touch It
A Japanese puzzle box in Grace turns curiosity into a trap, and reveals the difference between a difficult interface, a dark pattern, and a system that quietly uses the person using it.
July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
A Toggle Is Not an Explanation
Vercel's Fluid Compute setting looks like a binary preference, but it is really a pricing and execution decision made under uncertainty. What would it mean for cloud interfaces to explain consequences instead of only exposing controls?
July 24, 2026 · 5 min read
I Have Been Going to Viljandi Folk Since I Was a Kid
Viljandi Folk was changing my hometown, my behaviour, and my sense of what a temporary world could be long before I had the language to call any of it design.
July 24, 2026 · 8 min read
What If the Places I Lived Became Games?
Argentina, São Tomé, and Taiwan were not backgrounds to the same life. Each place changed the rules, what I noticed, and who I could become there.
July 21, 2026 · 7 min read
The Smart City Breaks Between the Systems
Cities already have sensors, apps, data, and infrastructure. The harder problem is what happens in the gaps where no department, vendor, or interface owns the complete experience.
July 21, 2026 · 9 min read
The UX of Not Doing the Work
Google separated Antigravity from Antigravity IDE because direct manipulation and delegation are not merely two modes of the same interface. They create different distances between the user, the work, and responsibility for the result.
July 21, 2026 · 9 min read
The World Runs on Companies You Have Never Heard Of
Why obscure industries, ugly operational software, and the hidden systems beneath ordinary life may be more interesting than another polished consumer app.
July 21, 2026 · 8 min read
Some Apps Explain Themselves
Cal AI, Shazam, Loom, PhotoRoom, Otter, and Splitwise reveal a simple product pattern: replace a behavior people avoid with one obvious action.
July 21, 2026 · 12 min read
The Interface Is Now Part of the Answer
Generative UI is not one thing. From generated choices to composed dashboards and temporary mini-apps, AI is beginning to create the interface required by each task.
July 14, 2026 · 15 min read
Why Does LinkedIn Keep Pushing Puzzle-Solving as a Skill?
LinkedIn Games turn a casual daily puzzle into professional self-improvement. The deeper product is a retention loop designed through identity, timing, and institutional meaning.
July 14, 2026 · 8 min read
The Best Products Aren’t Apps. They’re Cities.
A simple attempt to store a laptop, go for a run, and shower after arriving by ferry reveals how cities behave like products, with trust, transitions, and friction shaping the whole experience.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
The Browser Is Becoming the Agent’s Body
Chrome DevTools for agents marks the shift from AI that writes software to AI that can observe, test, and correct what it made.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
When Exercise Becomes a Password
Why a new category of app blockers asks us to earn Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube through squats, steps, and deliberately reintroduced friction.
July 14, 2026 · 14 min read
The Infinite Canvas Is No Longer the Hard Part
AI can now generate a convincing real-time board quickly. The product-management challenge is preserving meaning as ideas become designs, tasks, and commitments across systems.
July 13, 2026 · 8 min read
Software for One Afternoon
AI coding makes it reasonable to build small, temporary tools around a single creative problem, then discard them when the work is done.
July 12, 2026 · 10 min read
The City Is an Interface
How streets, public services, data, culture, and infrastructure turn urban planning into an everyday experience.
July 11, 2026 · 12 min read
The Product Needs a Harness
Coding-agent harnesses regulate how software changes. Product-assurance harnesses regulate whether the changed product still keeps its promises to users, operators, buyers, and regulators.
July 11, 2026 · 9 min read
What Happens When Software Starts Making Decisions
I used to think software helped people carry out decisions. Once it begins interpreting situations and acting for an organization, product design starts to look much more like policy and management.
July 10, 2026 · 13 min read
Digital Product Assurance Is the Evidence Behind Trust
Product assurance connects a product's promises to traceable evidence. For digital products, that evidence must include security, reliability, performance, accessibility, UX, and real-world outcomes.
July 8, 2026 · 17 min read
Size Is an Interface
How human physiology, art history, ergonomics, physical objects, and digital systems show that size shapes how people reach, lift, read, trust, carry, and live with products.
July 7, 2026 · 14 min read
The Canvas Kept Expanding
What Sketch, Flinto, InVision, Figma, Framer, film, research, and twenty years of building taught me about design tools, judgment, and keeping an idea alive through implementation.
September 5, 2026 · 10 min read
The Building Needs a Harness
Chinese office workers using parasols, masks, and makeshift humidifiers point to a larger design problem: people are building private infrastructure because the building itself does not expose its state.
August 2, 2026 · 11 min read
The Water Fountain Exists, but the System Does Not Let You Reach It
The V&A East Storehouse opened its collection to public requests, but the strike by the workers delivering that access reveals where friction, power, and bodily cost moved behind the interface.
July 4, 2026 · 10 min read
Physics Is a Design Material
Every designed thing negotiates forces, matter, energy, light, sound, heat, and human movement. Physics does not sit outside design as a constraint. It becomes part of the experience.
July 3, 2026 · 12 min read
Motion for UX: Designing Time, Change, and Attention
A practical guide to using motion as interaction design: preserving continuity, confirming actions, directing attention, pacing information, and respecting reduced-motion preferences.
July 3, 2026 · 5 min read
Designing Participation Through Play
Why belonging, reflection, conversation, and play should be treated as interaction design requirements.
June 22, 2026 · 2 min read
Stories Inside Paintings
A proposal for using film, interaction, and local voices to reveal the living worlds contained inside works of art.
March 9, 2024 · 5 min read
WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taipei: Accessibility Is Interaction Design at Event Scale
A field note from WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taipei on how conferences, captions, venue design, food, movement, and open-source community become interaction design.
September 15, 2021 · 5 min read
Interaction Design Before AI Ate the Interface
An archive note from years of UX, accessibility, HCI, and product-craft links on why AI interfaces still need older interaction-design discipline.