Koru celebrated its 5 year anniversary in February 2025, and to mark the occasion I directed and contributed to a top to bottom redesign and refresh of the brand.

We introduced a refinement of the logo and wordmark, colours that represent the energy of the studio, a new website, widely used deck template, social media artwork, icons, swag, and a bold new tagline.

In August of 2024, I transitioned the year-long creation of the HomeBridge venture and its requisite service map, process documentation, ideal customer profile(s), origination product, go-to-market experiments, and customer experience protocols to the permanent team.

Humanistic was asked by the CTO of a US automaker’s commercial vehicles group to uncover novel products, services, technology, and platform opportunities relevant to vehicle upfitting/modification.

We captured and mapped the attitudes, behaviours, tool-chains, and needs of a wide range of actors in the upfitting ecosystem. These artifacts were analyzed to surface insight, opportunities, and generate thoughtful strategic recommendations. We delivered a comprehensive snapshot of the competitive market landscape, a detailed system-level depiction of the entire industry value web, and an analysis of organizations to approach for partnership or acquisition.

At the height of the NFT craze of 2021, I worked with the product design team at Shopify to validate the feasibility and usability of complex smart contract interactions with users across a wide range of crypto experience levels.

I created all screen UI, app flows UX, wallet connection logic, and a complete UI component design system, which enabled the development team to build the multi-platform app in a few weeks in order to have it ready for Shopify's employee summit.

A landmark crypto community approached us to create a fun and interactive way to explore, create and play with their NFT.

Humanistic collaborated openly and directly with the Nouns NFT community to uncover a desired feature set, interactions, and design directions. We designed custom interactions and novel interface elements enabling app users to create their own custom Nouns using the NFT’s asset library.

In 2020, Humanistic partnered with the head scientist (HCI Group) at a prominent global technology company for assistance with envisioning novel software systems and interactions to enrich their AR/VR hardware plans.

Over the course of a year, we explored the future of spatial computing on a 15 year time horizon to present anticipatory scenarios, and completed a general purpose computing spatial operating system guideline.

Through a broad exploratory futures project, I lead a team of researchers to develop hundreds of valuable hardware/software opportunities, patentable IP, and novel spatial human-computer interactions related to AR/VR operating systems, platforms, and use cases.

Co-designed a comprehensive general purpose computing OS design guideline for spatial computing. The guideline focussed on virtual environments, novel interaction models, AR/VR use cases, default applications, system rules and privacy, and a maturity model mapping OS capabilities to emergent hardware features.

Humanistic was retained to help explore and develop novel ADAS system functionality based on internal & external sensors for a large European luxury automaker partnered with a global tech company.

I co-developed an emotional recognition & response system leveraging cognitive psychology, social science, and children’s play behaviours. Also, created an in-depth environment/vehicle event trigger framework that classified and assisted in detecting external adverse events. Additionally, we generated a series of driver/passenger scenarios showing real-life driving situations where a in-car AI agents can improve safety.

Humanistic was approached by a large global tech company to explore how they might leverage their extensive portfolio of smart, connected devices to enable both ambient human computer interaction and next-generation multimodal gesture interaction.

I lead an extensive futures design sprint to uncover multiple novel technology investment areas; created concepts and research roadmaps for nearly a dozen new classes of consumer electronics devices. I co-lead researchers to develop an entirely new and cohesive interaction paradigm that weaved together the client’s diverse ecosystem of connected in-home devices.

Humanistic partnered with ElementAI and LG’s office of the CTO to answer the question: how might people interact with an intelligent home and the appliances of the future?

We described 24 plausible future scenarios and use cases where autonomous LG appliances could play a central role in everyday life. These future use case scenarios  and the novel inventions within them were plotted on an innovation roadmap for the office of the CTO, driving critical future AI research & technical investment at LG. We also generated an industry framework for autonomous smart home appliances behaviour that classifies them on a guideline with a scale of 5 distinct levels - similar to self-driving vehicles.

The head of HCI at a global smartphone manufacturer retained Humanisitc to explore and design novel interaction patterns for an AI based ‘app-less’ smartphone that could predict user intent.

Humanistic delivered the vision of a new AI-first mobile OS, including major user interactions, interface patterns, UI elements, and assets. Through exploratory research, we identified dozens of plausible scenarios where the system could build models of user behaviour and offer predictive suggestions. Our work also explored novel ‘human-in-the-loop’ training interactions to inspect and improve this next-generation operating system.

The CTO at Wave Financial tasked Humanistic with identifying the forces shaping entrepreneurship, and how new business owners could be made more successful using data science and machine learning.

Humanistic provided a rapid scan of the horizon for novel finance & machine intelligence applications in incumbent markets, emergent global entrepreneur behaviours, and newly formed social practices. We developed a number of speculative future scenarios which explored how future entrepreneurs might run these businesses and identified high-growth opportunities for Wave at the intersection of small business behaviours, automation, and machine intelligence. This futures work delivered strategic guidance that informed a market-leading machine intelligence vision, key business acquisitions, and the development of multiple future products and services.

In 2016, Helpful wanted to address a void in the employee engagement market: authentic human feedback. As product lead, I worked to discover new ways that a modern, engaging video platform could help.

I worked closely with Helpful's machine learning and data science team to explore novel methods for training the application to produce knowledgable results about a workforce. Through an iterative approach, we delivered a fun and fast video messaging platform for connecting people at work/

In 2014, I was part of the team that delivered ALDO's store of the future vision through the installation and deployment of key technologies and experiences in their stores.

This massive vision for the future of retail spanned the gamut of mobile in-store interactions to large format interactive displays. As such, my role was to ensure a cohesive experience across these touchpoints by exploring, testing, designing and launching these experiences in Kinetic Café's prototype lab, at ALDO HQ and in pilot stores across the US and Canada.