A studio for a studio. lab.plstic.com

Humans are now the Interface. In the age of intelligence, products need to meet us where we're at. This means we still need rich interfaces, artifacts to grasp. We need systems to learn us, and we still need control. I wrote most of these in early February. So many of these still hold true. This doesnt surprise me. Designers / Builders let me know what you think.

My story lives through what I design.

It's rare that we get a chance to do something we truly believe in. And when you do, you want to share it with everyone. In my own words.

Creativity = Analog + HI Productivity = Digital + AI - The Thinkable Desktop Studio is your analog creative computer. Step away from your screens to think deeply. Capture atomically and optimize for divergent thinking.

The Analog Creative Computer: If apple designed one – it might look like this The Desktop Studio acts as the display, apps & storage. You are the CPU - the human intelligence & intuition behind ideas, and creative breakthroughs. The human brain has 2.5 petabytes of storage and processes 50,000 thoughts per day. The conscious brain has a 500-600 ms response, but the unconscious brain has a 50 ms response rate – by the time you are conscious of something, your body has already reacted to it through primitive neural networks. - The Thinkable Desktop Studio is patent-pending, premium instrument for thinking, which enhances your creativity through ergonomic design and cognitive science principles. It is a distraction-free space for thinking and creating. And its launching soon! -sanj 🚀 Thinkable Desktop Studio - Kickstarter coming soon. Sign up for early discounts through the link in bio. 🚀 Tangible Thinking OS - Digital book available now. Learn more and purchase via the link in bio.

I've fallen in love with durable design. Objects that weather with age, and forms that continue to be useful. On the flip side of the coin, is intention. That's the intention of the designer, and the intention of the designed. My take, Intention leads to Durability - Since I have you hear, let me share some other thoughts. I'm sensing a push back to speed, in favour of figuring out why. But I don't think its fast enough to benefit everyone. I'm seeing a mad fragmentation to AI interfaces, where thinking happens everywhere, and there's a constant erosion of original ideas. What I am loving is the art that's being created by designers prompting code. What I'm not loving is the path to distribution or monetization. And that goes for everything I'm seeing get built with AI. Is anything materially different in our lives before the LLMs came? Given what we know now, what should we be shaping?

Being a multi-dimensional designer has been my biggest flex. Having the skills to craft spatially, physicaly and digitally gives you a greater lattitude in what can design. Once you see intelligence a dimension, everything begins to make sense.

We are not slow computers.

hello world

I think we need to start thinking about multi-AGI (mAGI) behaviour - not just AGI in isolation. With RSI / AGI, we won’t know what’s going to happen once multiple systems begin evolving alongside each other. How do multiple independently developed AGIs interact with each other? What’s the forum in which they communicate? Do they co-operate, or compete? How do they evolve together while each is moving through their own RSI loop? What emerges between them that we wouldn’t see by studying an AGI in isolation? The sooner that is played out, the sooner we’ll start to understand AGI. If multiple independently developed AGIs emerge, these interactions will happen whether we deliberately design for them or not.

UI design has gone the way of the suburbs. This feels like sprawl, strip malls, generic houses, fast food and drive-thrus.

We only see what we know. We can only change what we see.

You no longer need the better version. Because whatever you have now, is better than the one you don’t have.

You get to a point where the interviewer has no clue how to read you. They can only judge you based on their own experience. They're following a script. They're looking for a tool. Case in point. When design leaders see hardware in my portfolio, they think "oh you do hardware, we do software". This is an instant tell that the interviewer has no idea, how hard it is to design software, for hardware. (Hardware has many different layers you have to design for - from the hardware interaction layer, windowing model, design system, and core applications) Recently I've been hearing "but what did you ship recently?" Which is code for, "well your previous expeirence shipping to millions, doesnt mean anything". I'm a designer to the core, I've been shipping for 30 years, and at a time where shipping is cheap, what you shape, that ships matters more than anything else. What I see and shape is ambiguity. Its my material.

Studios are workspaces for the mind. AI still doesn’t have one. The black and white image is my dorm room from my first year of architecture school. I painted on the walls, built models on my drafting table, and listened to music on a cassette player. Many years later, I have another studio. It’s where I work every day on new ideas. It feels just as inspiring as the first one. There’s a common thread between them. Light. Inspiration. And the ability to touch my own work. Today, part of my thinking lives in someone else’s mind. In the collective intelligence of all the systems I use. Claude, ChatGPT, Granola, Paper, Figma, Markdown files. The list keeps growing. But I think there’s something missing. The layer that connects one area of work to another. File systems used to give projects a place. Now folders, chats, documents, transcripts, and AI conversations increasingly replace that structure. It’s harder to know what’s relevant and what isn’t. Harder to return to an anchored thought. AI is missing its ergonomics. It’s missing the visual layer that connects one set of ideas to another. A layer that reveals the topology of thought. I don’t know if it’s possible to map that clearly. It’s hard enough to map our own thinking. That’s why we write, draw, make models, or build things that last. We create durable artifacts of a particular point in time. They let us hold an idea still while we come to terms with it, long enough to understand it, shape it, and eventually give it to someone else. AI is missing its studio. Right now, it is mostly a stream of conversations, files, fragments, and conflicting outcomes. The studio is the place where those things become visible, connected, and ours. It’s such an interesting problem to solve.