Interactivity

Fail-Safe Foresight: Practicing Strategic Foresight in Today’s Organizations

In this tutorial you will learn:Foundations of foresight strategy, methods, and practicesOrganizational and psychological reasons many foresight programs fail, and how to counteract themExercises to practice foresight skillsTake-home template for your own foresight databaseEthnographers and researchers frequently play the role of canary in the coal mine, sounding the alarm about weak signals that will become big problems if left unaddressed. But all too often, their warnings are not acted upon i

Your Tech Stack Needs A Thinking Stack: Building a High-Value Ethnographic Practice in the AI Era

In this tutorial you will learn:The promises, limitations, and professional implications of AI research toolsCognitive and social dynamics of automations and human–AI interactionThe core drivers of value and creative adaptation in ethnographic workStrategies for deciding when and how your team should integrate AI research toolsAs AI research tools and the pressure to use them proliferate, it’s time to evolve our tech stacks. Even more urgently, it’s time to evolve our ‘thinking stacks’ so we can

Creating a Strategic Role for Research in Your Organization

In this highly interactive workshop you will learn to:Facilitate a strategic alignment workshop with stakeholdersOrganize business unknowns and research requests into learning objectivesSurface assumptions and low confidence knowledge to solve for constraints that could limit research impactCraft a research roadmap with stakeholder buy-inEstablish the credibility and strategic role of the research team and services it can provideResearch impact is typically associated with the important work of

Ethnofutures for Innovation: Practicing Foresight with Diverse Intelligences

In this tutorial you will:Integrate foresight and ethnography for multimodal data collection and analysisIdentify people and innovation centers at the leading edge of your research or market domainBuild grounded future scenarios that support discovery, strategy, planning, and decision makingDiscover use cases for applying ethnofutures in your own workPredictive analytics have become increasingly sophisticated, yet organizations still struggle to anticipate and plan for social change, emerging us

Thinking and Communicating with Frameworks: Using Visual Frameworks to Strengthen Insights and Communicate Findings

Creating visual frameworks is a powerful method for making complex information comprehensible, persuasive, and actionable. Visual frameworks:Help you to synthesize and refine rich, multilayered research into the insights that are most relevant to your challenge or strategic goalMake insights legible and persuasive to teams and stakeholders across business, product, engineering, and designProvide a shared point of reference to inform iterative, cross-functional conversations and solutionsThis tut

Beyond “It’s Complex”: How to Recognize, Analyze, and Apply Systems Frameworks

In this tutorial you will learn:How to recognize and understand systemsSystems thinking, cybernetic thinking, and complexity modelsPractical tools for analyzing ethnographic data and making strategic or tactical recommendations‘Systems’ and ‘complexity’ are buzzwords these days – they frequently refer to anything complicated, interrelated, multivariate, or just difficult to understand. But there are well-developed models and methodologies that empower us to identify, analyze, act, and create cha

Trust Unpacked: Using Social Insights to Understand and Cultivate Trust

In this tutorial you will:Learn social frameworks for understanding and cultivate trustMap definitions, measurement, and practices of trust in your own spaceApply frameworks most relevant to your organization, industry, constituencies, or marketsCollaboratively identify and address factors that hinder trustExamine trust in critical areas, including AI and healthcareIt’s practically business orthodoxy that trust = growth = trust, but trust remains poorly conceptualized and mismeasured in many org

Mobilizing Teams with Tangible Theory: Collective Sensemaking for Actionable and Scalable Insights

In this tutorial you will:Clarify the implicit and explicit roles of theory in research, design, and strategyLearn a method for collective sensemaking with interdisciplinary teams and non-expertsUse theory to make insights actionable and scale beyond a single projectFacilitate meaningful material interaction that enables stakeholders to realize the full potential of insights and new opportunitiesSometimes sidelined as esoteric thinking that bogs down action, theory is always in action when we do

Designing AI to Think with Us, Not for Us: A Guide to Cognitive Offloading

In this tutorial you will learn:Mechanisms, benefits, and harms of cognitive offloading in human–AI interactionHow to use the Cognitive Offloading Matrix for decision making about AI design and innovationStrategies for gaining organizational buy-in for AI that empowers people and builds trustTechnology has long shaped how we think, remember, and learn, from writing to calculators to navigation apps. But as rapidly evolving, emergent genAI solutions drive organizational and product strategy, we f

The three thirds

An entire generation of designers climbed the ladder. A third say it got better. A third say it got worse. A third aren’t sure.Photo by 360floralflaves on UnsplashSomeone asked me what I do at a dinner last month. Normal question. I’ve answered it a thousand times. But this time I paused. Not because I didn’t know the answer — I manage seven designers at a European bank — but because the answer didn’t feel like mine anymore.I said it anyway. “I’m a designer.” And the word sat in my mouth like a

Design debt is now as dangerous as technical debt

If you want to put AI adoption at risk, ignore the design debt at your own peril.It doesn’t announce itself, but sits there, quietly, underneath every product decision you make, until one day the cost of moving forward is so high that you have to look down.This is a very accurate (and literal) way of describing what it feels like to accumulate design debt. If you had shivers just from reading it, you’ve been there. Frankly, we’ve all been there at some point, despite organizations sweeping the p

Making vs. the machine

What are we willing to pay to get paid? Embracing non-commercial creativity.I used to dream of having a job where I could be creative. I wanted to be paid to do the thing I loved. I had read about starving artists and struggling creatives, and I was happy and proud when I found a job in the creative field right out of college. After graduating, I became a graphic designer in the marketing field and from there, I worked my way up the corporate ladder.For many years, I loved my job and the world o

The design engineer symptom: what a rising job title reveals

Trying to define Design Engineering today, and why the confusion around it turned out to matter.“UX Designer”, “UX/UI Builder”, “UX Engineer”, “Product Builder”, “Design Engineer”… As job titles multiply, so does the confusion about what’s actually expected. — Made with GeminiHave you ever read a job title and felt like it was made for you, only to lose your smile reading the actual responsibilities? As a designer with a frontend development background, it happened to me more than once. I love U

When AI experiences fail, who is held accountable?

AI-designed experiences are failing real people. The designer, the PM, the vendor, and the company are all pointing somewhere else.Photo by Austin Distel on UnsplashA man’s father died. He asked a chatbot what to do next.Jake Moffatt’s father had just passed away. He needed to book a last-minute flight. He went to Air Canada’s website, found the chatbot, and asked about bereavement fares. The bot gave him instructions. He followed them. He booked his tickets.The information was wrong.When Moffat

Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

Hey HN, Chris and Yuhong here from Onyx (https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx). We’re building an open-source chat that works with any LLM (proprietary + open weight) and gives these LLMs the tools they need to be useful (RAG, web search, MCP, deep research, memory, etc.).Demo: https://youtu.be/2g4BxTZ9ztgTwo years ago, Yuhong and I had the same recurring problem. We were on growing teams and it was ridiculously difficult to find the right information across ou

Show HN: Zen Moment – A Developer-Friendly Breathing and Meditation Platform

Backstory: As a developer who spent years in front of screens dealing with stress and focus issues, I found most meditation apps either too childish or too commercial. I wanted to create a minimalist, developer-oriented tool that treats meditation as a productivity and mental health necessity rather than a trendy accessory. After optimizing the neumorphic design, SEO performance, and curating a library of natural soundscapes, I'm excited to share this with the HN community. What ma

Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere

Hey y’all, Kartik, Ishaan, and Christian from Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) here. We’re building a web and mobile agentic IDE for Claude Code and Codex that lets you run and interact with coding agents from anywhere. Omnara lets you run Claude Code and Codex sessions on your own machine, and exposes those sessions through a web and mobile interface so you can stay involved even when you’re away from your desk. Think of it like Claude Code Desktop or Conductor, except you can co

Instagram Video Downloader: How SSSInstagram Helps Save Videos Easily

What Makes SSSInstagram Different?SSSInstagram is an online service designed specifically for downloading Instagram videos without any technical knowledge. Unlike many apps that require installation or registration, SSSInstagram works directly in your browser and is completely free.The tool supports all major Instagram content types and works equally well on desktop and mobile devices.What Can You Download with SSSInstagram?SSSInstagram allows users to download:- Instagram videos- Reels- Stories

Show HN: AI assistant that reads Intervals.icu data and adjusts workouts

Hi HN,I’m a self-coached endurance athlete and long-time user of Intervals.icu. Over the years I’ve gotten comfortable interpreting my own training data (CTL/ATL trends, HRV, fatigue, etc.), but I kept running into a practical problem:The training plan makes sense when you write it, but real life rarely cooperates.Bad sleep, work travel, missed workouts, or suddenly having only 45 minutes instead of two hours. In those moments the question becomes: does the planned workout still make sense

The Limits of Today's AI Systems

Recently, I’ve increasingly come to believe that intelligence is no longer AI’s bottleneck. The systems we build around it are. Input Paradox (1) The first issue is the input paradox. When interacting with AI, if the prompt is highly detailed, the model tends to overfit to the user’s framing and assumptions. If it is too concise, the model lacks the context needed to generate something truly useful. This creates a paradox: to preserve the model’s independent reasoning, you should say less — but