I do not treat that as an abstract puzzle. I treat it as a design brief.
Humanness needs conditions to flourish, and conditions can be built. The Project is organized around four streams, each approaching the question from a different side.
AI in service of humanness
This stream carries a thesis, not a topic: AI can help build the conditions humanness needs to flourish. As intelligent systems take on more of the work we once defined ourselves by, an old question becomes practical for everyone: what is a human life for? I read that as an opening.
This stream asks how AI can support presence, connection, and communities deciding for themselves what matters. And it asks the question underneath: who gets to decide what these tools are for?
01. The Gatekeeper Becomes the Caregiver
Completed | Essay
Who Decides What Care Means
Somewhere today, an older adult is waiting to learn whether an algorithm decided they qualify for home care. A score turns their needs into a number. A model approves or denies. A device watches for outcomes no one asked them to define.
None of this began in bad faith. Scoring is fast, and care at scale is hard. But the people closest to the care, those receiving it and those giving it, have no way into the systems now deciding it.
The question I keep returning to: how do we build the way in?
Read full paper
Who Decides What Care Means
Somewhere today, an older adult is waiting to learn whether an algorithm decided they qualify for home care. A score turns their needs into a number. A model approves or denies. A device watches for outcomes no one asked them to define.
None of this began in bad faith. Scoring is fast, and care at scale is hard. But the people closest to the care, those receiving it and those giving it, have no way into the systems now deciding it.
The question I keep returning to: how do we build the way in?
Read full paper
Mortality infrastructure
Dying is one of the most human thresholds we cross, and one of the least designed for.
This stream brings design to deathcare: how a person remains present to their own dying, how communities hold grief, and what spaces and systems worthy of that threshold would look like. The Mortality Commons lives here. It is threshold work, and it is done with tenderness.
01. The Anatomy of Death in America
Completed | Essay
Where This Began
Most of us plan a wedding in detail and leave our own death to chance. Only one in three people have an advance directive. Fewer have said aloud how they want to be cared for at the end, or what should happen after. So when death comes, the people left behind meet it as logistics: forms, costs, decisions in a fog, grief crowded out by the scramble.
This was the first thing I studied, years ago. It is where the rest of the work began.
The question underneath it: what would let us speak of death before it arrives?
Read full paper
Where This Began
Most of us plan a wedding in detail and leave our own death to chance. Only one in three people have an advance directive. Fewer have said aloud how they want to be cared for at the end, or what should happen after. So when death comes, the people left behind meet it as logistics: forms, costs, decisions in a fog, grief crowded out by the scramble.
This was the first thing I studied, years ago. It is where the rest of the work began.
The question underneath it: what would let us speak of death before it arrives?
Read full paper
Designer as infrastructure
Some infrastructure is made of concrete and code. Some is made of judgment.
This stream studies the capacity inside the designer: the practical wisdom to act well in situations that resist general rules, and the responsibility that comes with shaping systems other people have to live in. Two papers anchor it, both presented at the Transition Design Conference in Mexico City in 2026: one on phronetic design, and one on implication as obligation.
01. Phronetic Design: Grounding the Posture of Transition in Practical Wisdom
Completed | Conference Paper
When the Method Runs Out
Halfway through a three-year food-systems process in Uruguay, the pandemic closed the format the team had planned. They could have called the loss small. Instead they named it plainly, then rebuilt the work online anyway, into events no one had wanted but the moment required.
No method told them how. What guided them was a kind of practical wisdom: the capacity to read what a situation asks and act well when no rule covers the ground.
The question I sit with: how is that capacity formed, and can it be taught?
Read full paper
When the Method Runs Out
Halfway through a three-year food-systems process in Uruguay, the pandemic closed the format the team had planned. They could have called the loss small. Instead they named it plainly, then rebuilt the work online anyway, into events no one had wanted but the moment required.
No method told them how. What guided them was a kind of practical wisdom: the capacity to read what a situation asks and act well when no rule covers the ground.
The question I sit with: how is that capacity formed, and can it be taught?
Read full paper
02. Implication as Obligation: Second-Order Cybernetics and Posture of Responsibility in Transition Design
Completed | Conference Paper
After the Room Empties
For years designers believed they could stand outside a system, map it, and leave. Second-order cybernetics says there is no outside. The one drawing the map is inside the room, shaping what they claim to observe.
Two words follow. Implication: you are folded into the system, not standing over it. Obligation: to build what lets the people there keep going once you are gone. In one water project, the center meant to carry the work was never built, so it scattered.
The question I sit with: what does a designer owe the people who live with the work after they leave?
Read full paper
After the Room Empties
For years designers believed they could stand outside a system, map it, and leave. Second-order cybernetics says there is no outside. The one drawing the map is inside the room, shaping what they claim to observe.
Two words follow. Implication: you are folded into the system, not standing over it. Obligation: to build what lets the people there keep going once you are gone. In one water project, the center meant to carry the work was never built, so it scattered.
The question I sit with: what does a designer owe the people who live with the work after they leave?
Read full paper
03. Future of Design
In progress | Essay
Future of design research project (timeline 1 year)
Future of design research project (timeline 1 year)
04. Healthcare Design
In progress | Thought piece
Forming masters of healthcare design - proposal to dean and head of school due end of summer. Thought pieces will come from this.
Forming masters of healthcare design - proposal to dean and head of school due end of summer. Thought pieces will come from this.