kinetic optimism studio
kinetic optimism studio

notes

 

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.

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.

The most advanced design method we have is our imagination

 
City-Whiteback.jpg

Every design process has tools and methods.

Personas. Journey maps. Prototypes. Sprints. Frameworks. These are useful.
They help you understand the situation and move through it systematically.
They work for things that already exist and need to be improved.

For things that do not yet exist — for the question of what a connected vehicle could be beyond transportation, what an AI system could understand beyond the command, what a public space could feel like if it noticed the people moving through it — these tools are necessary but not sufficient.

The method that works in genuinely open space is imagination.
As a persistent orientation — the practice of staying in the question long enough that something genuinely new becomes visible.

We have been doing this with Ford Edge Software Research team since 2017: asking what a software-defined vehicle could do in the social situations it already inhabits. The answers took the form of experience propositions.
Some became patents. Some shaped platform architecture. All of them began from the shared place: imagination applied to a specific situation, held there long enough to find what the situation actually contained.

 
wojtek szumowski