The situation-centric design practice

Every connected system contains unrealized social potential.

To notice a situation. To make a gesture. To participate in the life of the people and places around it.

My work starts from a simple question: what role could technology play?

The answers are concrete and inhabitable. They are not finished products. They are design questions made tangible enough to build toward.

Walk_with_me

A connected vehicle spends ninety-five percent of its life parked. Its sensors are active. Its lights are controllable. Its relationship to the community around it has not been designed.
Walk With Me asks what changes when the fleet's capability is organized around the street, not only the owner. The lights come on softly as a person approaches in a dark parking structure — triggered by proximity, not ownership.
A civic resource. Already there. Not yet asked for.

Ring_my_bell

A driver approaching a cyclist. The only available word is a horn. The horn carries the grammar of a private vehicle asserting priority.
The situation required something closer to: I see you. Take your time.
We gave the car a bicycle bell — one sound borrowed from a different social world, carrying a grammar of courtesy between people sharing a path. The joint US Patent followed.

Care_and_presence

In serious illness, adaptive technology is already present. The question is whether it participates in the care.
Someone is in treatment. The people who care about them are far away. The platform sends reminders. Accurately. On schedule. It does not witness.
*Get Well Glow* is a connected ambient experience — a soft pulse of light, sent from someone thinking of you right now, received without words, without a notification, without asking anything of the person on the other end.
Awareness itself is a resource in healing. The technology was already in the room. It had simply never been asked to hold this.

Small_talk_bus_stop

A bus stop that lets you talk to birds.
Every connected system is using a fraction of what the situation it is inside actually contains.
The relationships already present. The human goals operating beneath the surface task. The moment of possible acknowledgment. Between a vehicle and a pedestrian, between a platform and a patient, between a piece of public infrastructure and the living world around it.

Free_range_umbrellas

*Strangers need strange moments together.* Making encounters slightly more possible.

*A note on this work: these are experience propositions, not technical documentation. All client specifics remain confidential. What is shown here is how I think.

Every connected system is already inside a social situation.

The relationships already present. The human goals operating beneath the surface task. The moment of possible acknowledgment. Between a vehicle and a pedestrian, between a platform and patient, between a piece of public infrastructure and the living world around it.

The question is what it does there.

What is already in this situation that the current design has not used?
I call this the surplus of social possibility.
A working concept. Not a poetic description. The gap between what a connected system currently does in its situation and what the situation contains. The starting point of a design process.

A bus stop is surrounded by birds.
They are simply there. Every morning, part of the life of this particular corner, this tree, this hour. Regardless of what the infrastructure was designed to do. The person standing nearby, looking at their phone for the third time, was always there too. The social possibility of that corner — strangers sharing a moment of attention to something neither of them controls — was always there.
None of it required new technology. It required asking what the situation already contained that the task had simply never been asked to notice. A machine learning system can identify the species and the call. A simple synthesizer can translate it into something a person could respond to. The bus stop becomes a place where you can have a brief, approximate conversation with another creature sharing the same urban space. The technology required was modest.

The shift was entirely in the question. What is already happening in this situation? What would it mean for the system to notice?

The surplus in nearly every AI interaction today is enormous and almost entirely untouched, because the design conversation is occupied with what the model can do, rather than what the situation already contains.

The relations. The intentions. The emotions.

The tender frequencies of being present in one's own life.

Curious_mirror

A parked vehicle whose side mirror turns outward — toward the street, toward the people walking past — rather than resting in its default inward-facing position. The change is a few degrees.
What it produces is 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.

It’s_going_to_rain

Parked cars that hear rain coming and tell the people walking past. Not a notification. Not a forecast. The sound of rain, arriving a few minutes early, carried forward by connected cars that were already listening.

Social_headphones

Equipping products with social skills.

Sound_compass

Investigating spatial awareness as emotional awareness.

Expanding Design Vocabulary

Experience Design's existing vocabulary was built for a narrower relationship with technology than the one we're now living inside.