k_o is an experience design and concept inquiry studio.
We work with product architects and technology teams to explore how connected, adaptive systems can participate more meaningfully in human life — not just perform tasks within it.
The studio operates as a continuing mode of inquiry. The work takes the form of experience frameworks, concept prototypes, and design propositions. Some become products. Some become patents. Some remain as proposals — clear enough to be evaluated, specific enough to be built toward.
The design position:
We work at the moment before the category forms.
Before the interaction pattern solidifies. Before platform logic constrains the design space. Before the relationship between people and a new technology has been decided.
In our experience, that is the moment design has the most to offer. It is also the moment most organizations move through too quickly — eager to get to the solution before the question has been fully asked.
We slow down at that moment. We study the situation: the social context, the emotional texture, the relationships already present. We ask what role technology could play in it. Then we make that role concrete.
The work:
Since 2018, the studio has partnered with Ford Product Development on software-defined mobility — exploring how a vehicle can be more than a means of transportation. How it can notice the situation it is in. How it can participate in the social life of the city around it. How the relationship between a person and their car can begin before the car arrives.
A US patent has been granted. Several patent disclosures are pending.
The studio has also worked in healthcare — supporting the human experience of cancer treatment and life-changing medical decisions, asking how adaptive technology could hold the emotional and relational dimensions of those experiences, not only their clinical logistics.
And in public space, in infrastructure, in financial services: wherever a connected system is present in the middle of a significant human experience and has not yet been asked what else it could do.
Clients and partners have included Ford, AstraZeneca, United Rentals, J&J, Lincoln, Mazda, and others.
Who we are:
k_o studio is a creative partnership between two designers, Wojtek Szumowski and Shabnam Hosseini, and the constellation of generous contributors in synergy with the courage, vision, and trust of our clients and partners.
Wojtek is an experience strategist with a background in sociology and product design. He has spent twenty years at the intersection of emerging technology and human experience — at CP+B, where he led experience strategy for eleven years and founded Room for More Possibilities; at VML, where he led experience innovation for Ford's software-defined vehicle platform; and through k_o, where that inquiry continues. He is particularly interested in the moment when a new technology is still open to being shaped — before the behavioral scripts form, before the social norms solidify — and what design can do in that window.
Shabnam is an artist, designer, and educator. Her eye is precise and unhurried. She works at the intersection of the material and the felt — creating experiential narratives that emerge from everyday context and leave room for the people inside them to bring their own meaning.
Together: we design for human experience that is more than life in permanent task mode.
What we are looking for:
k_o studio functions as an ongoing inquiry into how people and technology relate to each other — and into what design can do about that relationship when it is still being formed.
We are looking for the next context where this way of seeing finds its most useful home.
If you are building connected systems and are asking what they could be — not only what they should do — we would like to be in that conversation.
