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Nouns was my introduction to the NFT landscape. Before I could get my hands dirty in pixels and screen flows, I worked with the team to understand the mechanics around NFTs, how the Nouns auction worked, what kind of artwork we were working with, and what it would take to make an application.

With the Nouns NFT holders, we pitched a minimal feature set for the app—which was promptly approved—and I began mapping the app, exploring the structure, and building prototypes. As this was not a traditional work-for-hire contract, the cadence around rounds of feedback and iteration was throw out of whack. Building the app leaned more heavily on my experience than it did the usual early testing I impart into product design projects.

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Sketching revealed many possible avenues, especially for hidden features/Easter eggs, but the majority of the effort was spent finding the right structure and flow for the application. Once our team was happy with the overall bones of the app, I began exploring the visual style in what my Humanistic co-founder and I call “non-destructive shit testing”. Doesn’t matter how dysfunctional, imprctical, or cobbled together it is — we explore countless iterations to demonstrate what a representative screen might look as a collaborative, co-creative canvas session. Figma and voice chat is key here.

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The application's skin evolved to its final form, and the rest of the app's design followed to completion. I built a rudimentary design system and component library so that screens, modules, and individual elements could be easily updated or swapped.

The usual back and forth with the engineers followed. Through rounds of test builds, we reached an acceptable candidate version to send to the larger Nouns community as a beta. The app was launched, measured, and we gathered feedback on the application and ganged the NFT community on what was working, and what wasn't.

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In addition to building the application, I worked to create tasty little animations for the app, a teaser website, the art and copy for the app store, and explored how it might work on an Apple Watch. In all, the application itself doesn’t do a great deal of much, but it represents a high-quality bar for other NFT communities to look toward when deciding to do something similar for themselves.

Check out the Nouns app on the App Store

As you’re reading this, there are secret teams across the globe engaging in an intense race to conjure up the next great leap in computing. Most of these R&D teams are betting that the next big thing has something to do with AR/VR, but none have yet been able to articulate a coherent vision of that future. For many, their aspirations appear to be limited and myopic, centring on narrow slices of functionality or “safe” existing markets like communications or gaming.

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We discovered something different: a once in a generation opportunity to create a comprehensive and immersive spatial platform whose scale rivals the internet itself. This vision was so bold and transformative that it required us to design an entirely new computing ‘metaphor’ — one which supports how people conceptualize their computing tasks today, while also supporting the more exotic and novel spatial computing activities that will be possible in the future. Essentially, our work furnished a deeper, and more human understanding of what actual people expect (and need) from a future ‘general purpose’ spatial operating system.

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To get there, I lead a team of Humanistic researchers through an extensive foresight study to uncover fascinating and emergent signals of change, trends, and the forces shaping the world of tomorrow bubbling beneath the surface. In parallel, we reviewed hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers, working closely with scientists and technical experts from a wide variety of fields (Optics, HCI, Semiconductor, ML, etc). This was integral to understanding the state of the art in the field, and to extrapolate it’s possible trajectories based on a number of key dimensions.

Furnished with these insights, we layered on multiple rounds of co-creative and in-depth ethnographic research with early adopters, everyday users, and key industry stakeholders at the forefront of the augmented and virtual reality space. Together with my co-founder, we lead the team through synthesis exercises to refine our findings into hundreds of directions the future could go, then workshopped the findings with our client to pick the uncertain ones for development.

With a comprehensive view of how the future might pan out, I lead the team to write an abundance of future scenarios describing the problems future people might have, and how future technologies could solve them. The scenarios produced an incredible amount of invaluable concepts and IP for our client.

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With the foresight phase complete, we set off with our findings to answer the question: what do we do with all this? The answer was to produce a guideline for how to leverage the untapped landscape of (what's been co-opted from Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) the metaverse.

Utilizing the decades research on the subject, and our own interaction and experience design expertise, we formulated our recommendation beyond what others were doing at the moment, to focus on something at the foundation of computing: the operating system. Our work produced a comprehensive set of human-first guidelines for how to build an OS that supports the layering and superimposing of realities, and the creation of a new ones — down to the fundamental aspects of a modern operating system.

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The result was a resounding success — our approach was able to commercialize decades of dormant R&D work, produce an exhaustive playbook and guideline for how to build the future as a dominant market leader in spatial computing, and lead to a massive internal shift in our partner’s vision and aspirations for the space.

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For the better part of a century, the basic human experience of driving a car has remained relatively unchanged — people must be alert, adhere to the rules of the road, and drive defensively. With the advent of a smartphone in everyone’s pocket (and now, on our dash), there hasn’t been a more dangerous time to operate a vehicle. No matter how skilled the driver, or how many safety features a vehicle has, distracted driving can have fatal consequences.

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Humanistic partnered with one of the large global automotive manufacturers and a massive tech company to explore how the addition of novel sensing technologies in future vehicle cabins might be able to cut down on distracted driving, as well as provide timely guidance in stressful driving conditions.

Through our exploration, it became clear that what was needed was some sort of intelligent (and emotionally affective) in-car agent — essentially a car with a dynamic personality like KITT from the hit 1980’s series Knight Rider. Such an in-car system would need to sense the situational context of the road, estimate the physical and mental states of the passengers and driver, and determine an appropriate emotional response. Many times this meant proactively interacting with the user to warn them or provide guidance, without a formal invoking by the occupants.

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The result of this work has spurred a number of major follow-on projects that begin the long process of commercializing these new technologies — drawing on the fields of social psychology, theories of human emotion, conversational frameworks, and the science of passively detecting human emotional cues.

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Tasked with exploring the deeper question of what might be possible if these individually ‘dumb’ devices worked together more seamlessly, Humanistic built off of Bill Buxton’s ideas on Ubiety; collections of devices that communicate with each other in the background to sense and anticipate human user’s needs.

Our designers and researchers led an exploration into how our technology partner might leverage their extensive portfolio of smart, connected devices to enable both practical ubiquitous computing and next generation multimodal interaction. Such a web of compatible connected devices could be utilized to enable intelligent personalized user experiences anywhere, any time, even when constrained by relatively little computing power.

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Humanistic conducted a broad ethnographic study of people from various economic backgrounds, walks of life, and lifestyles in order to construct models of how they built connected device ecosystems around their lives.

Combined with these insights, our team also performed an extensive horizon scan of existing and emergent IoT products and platforms, following with a foresight study to gather and analyze those signals, trends, and forces shaping the ubiquitous computing landscape - not to mention the changing nature of relationships, home and work.

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The result of this engagement was a detailed treatise on how to architect a device ecosystem which enables humans to interact with teams of connected devices seamlessly, as well as an entirely new interaction model which guides intelligent device behaviours, and enables natural ambient, spatialized user experiences with users.

"Humanistic is like our external brain. They operate like no designers I’ve ever met, producing groundbreaking research for us that has influenced strategy and technical roadmaps. Not only do they understand the business and design aspects of the challenge, but the actual science underneath, reviewing hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to understand the technical nuance in the space."

— WL
Chief Scientist, HCI Research Group, Confidential Client

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In partnership with ElementAI and LG’s Office of the CTO, Humanistic’s objective was twofold: design a framework that structured the ‘levels of intelligence’ that an AI enabled home appliance might exhibit, and lay out a compelling vision of the home of the future which enabled LG to push even further ahead as the leader in the smart home and intelligent appliance space.

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Members of the Humanistic team collaborated with stakeholders at both ElementAI and LG to produce a wide variety of thought provoking and speculative future scenarios based on intelligent appliances in the home.

Imagination activities like this are critical in uncovering future ‘human problems’ that might manifest themselves when our homes and appliances are intelligent. They also help us anticipate how the needs and desires of people might change in response to the future world around them — like with climate change, economic instability, an aging population, and the overall shifting role of the home.

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Ultimately, we grounded these speculative future scenarios by building a maturity model which defines increasing levels of artificial intelligence, not only in appliances, but in the home in aggregate. This model would go on to function as LG’s northstar for successfully executing machine intelligence in the home, and their general AI ambitions for the coming decade.

"Imagining how machine intelligence might change the world is a complex undertaking. Humanistic helped us tremendously with this high-stakes project, moving quickly to embed themselves with our team to execute and contribute unique perspectives. Matt, Shawn, and the Humanistic team brought an invaluable level of expertise to the table."

— Karthik Ramakrishnan
‍VP, Head of Industry Solutions & Advisory, ElementAI

Watch LG announced their plans and AI ambitions in regards to our work at CES 2020.

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As a software company who enables small business operators, Wave Accounting wins when their users win. With this in mind, Wave engaged Humanistic to lead a research and foresight engagement with a primary goal of identifying the forces shaping technology enabled entrepreneurship, and how it’s mediated by the burgeoning fields of data science and machine learning.

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Humanistic researchers scanned the horizon for novel machine intelligence applications in incumbent markets, emergent global entrepreneur behaviours, and newly formed social practices within the broader finance and financial products/services spaces. As a result we identified a number of high-growth opportunities for Wave, illuminating new and competitive applications at the intersection of emerging small business owner behaviours, automation, and machine intelligence.

Within these high growth opportunity areas, we developed a number of speculative future scenarios which explored how future entrepreneurs might run their businesses in the world of tomorrow — and powered by tomorrow's technologies. Largely exploratory, these scenarios pushed the limit of contemporary accounting, imagining interactions with machine intelligence, automated fulfilment, smart bookkeeping, or dealing with multiple jurisdictional tax codes.

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Our work provided Wave with extremely valuable future-oriented insights and opportunities — guidance that informed a market-leading machine intelligence vision, a number of key business acquisitions, and the development of multiple future products and services.

"Shawn and Matt at Humanistic brought a number of unique and fresh perspectives to the table, along with an incredible work ethic. They produced high-quality results in a remarkably short period of time and broadened our thinking about what the vision of this organization could be. Working with them was a great spark for creativity and innovation."

— Ideshini Naidoo
‍Chief Technology Officer, Wave Financial

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Humanistic was approached by a large smartphone manufacturer to solve an app integration problem in their OS, and ended up proposing a new vision for how a modern mobile operating system could work. Our work helped inform approaches to interaction design, user experience, data collection and on-device computation for future market-ready versions of their popular mobile OS.

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To get there, our designers led a number of workshops to uncover and separate what was actually possible versus science fiction, enumerate the array of different sensor or data inputs which could be fused to make assumptions about a user’s context, and discover opportunities for where we could push the envelope with local on-device processing. Armed with these insights, various models of human behaviour, our team began to piece together a vision for how a mobile OS could automate a person’s life while keeping the human in the loop and in control.

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The final output of the project and the prototype was a huge success. So much so that aspects of the project have been integrated into subsequent generations of their mobile OS as banner features — part of a long-term strategy to help users offload some of the finicky interactions that have plagued mobile computing.

"It was lovely working with the team at Humanistic. With such a complex domain area, it wasn’t always clear on how to proceed forward. Matt & Shawn found a way to connect the dots for us and find the signal hidden in the noise. They have quite a unique understanding of technology and user experience, I look forward to working with them again soon."

— SM
‍Senior Scientist, HCI Research Group, Confidential Client

As a product leader, I had my hand in building and validating all of the wild and strategic ideas that came from Daniel and Farhan. The product took many forms and three major pivots over my tenure, however, it was the earliest of days where the nitty-gritty real-world problem seeking was most crucial. 

Reaching out to, and diving deep with prospective customers divulged an interesting systemic blindspot in SMEs — employee turnover meant getting to know both your immediate team, and the broader, larger company was difficult. After much concept exploration, we decided to pursue a kind of intelligent employee directory with a fun game to get to know your team.

Trying to keep things simple, I hacked together clickable prototypes and cobbled together unanswered questions to launch an ongoing series of interviews with potential users at companies in the Toronto area. People seemed to get it, were willing to try it, and were actually kind of excited about getting to know people in their company.

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I worked with our amazing engineering team to build a functional app that allowed a manager to launch the app within their team, people could sign up and immediately add a few things about themselves which would be added to the game. Launched in 2016, the Helpful directory and game was very successful in the small groups we tested with.

In early 2017, our team started to explore adding quick, ephemeral video messages to the directory to solve our own pain: standup. The team had grown, and people (including myself) commuted from all over the GTA to the office for 9 — but not always on time. Well before pandemic Zoom remote work, we thought that perhaps adding a video message for everyone’s morning update might be a good way to make sure everyone could contribute asynchronously when they couldn’t make it to standup.

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My role at Helpful took on many heads: working as product lead, interpreting the vision and ideas from the executives, managing a product designer while interfacing with product management and engineering, and also working in an exploratory capacity with our machine learning/data science experts. We launched exciting experiments starting in the final days of the game (training the system to help people find someone who can help with x), and later on the video platform, creating better ways to transcribe videos, learn from the transcripts, exploring augmented reality, and generative recommendations.

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Helpful’s app eventually turned into a fantastic short-format video messaging suite that allowed teams to provide feedback on projects, or for managers to provide feedback to employees. During this period, I lead the product and engineering team to element a comprehensive design system and product exploration/iteration cycle. Along with product management, our feature exploration, user testing, build, launch and measurement practice led to an application that began to take shape as a proper enterprise communication tool. We launched with small business owners with fleets of remote, distributed employees; banks for providing employee feedback and executive updates; and major airlines as a way to allow employees to asynchronously communicate across the vast distances at an airport.

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Helpful continued on this path while simultaneously spinning up Dialog, an open conversation platform. Dialog allowed people to create real-time podcasts where listeners could pop in with questions to the hosts. If this sounds familiar, Helpful created Dialog in 2018, two years before Clubhouse.

Helpful was acquired by Shopify in 2019.