Oh, to Be Known By My Computer!
A pattern for designing intelligent products
We live in the world by way of a slick, plastic surface.
Interfaces — designed and built by people like us — dictate how we learn, connect, express ourselves, find work, navigate desire, and structure our days. As digital tools become common utility, digital product design has become the dominant way we interact with reality. And now, everything feels cold.
We swipe, scroll, tap, and sort, trained by countless frictionless systems to expect clarity, speed, and control. In the name of optimization we’ve been forced to endure sterility. And this ease comes at a cost: it now feels more difficult than it used to to hear each other, hold attention, share meals, or feel connected.
We’ve grown addicted to organizing our digital lives into neatly labeled folders, categorizing our thoughts, flattening our emotions into emoji reactions and memes. Big User Interface™ seduces us with a false promise: that order equals understanding, that legibility equals truth.
At XXIX, we build visual identities, websites, apps, operating systems, and ways of organizing information for humans that take the form of visual identities, websites, apps, even operating systems. We rearrange inputs into experiences. And increasingly, we’ve been finding ourselves chafing against the very paradigms we’re asked to reinforce.
Shape Shaping the Shaper
It’s hard to picture the internet if not as user interface. When you imagine the World Wide Web, do you just call to mind the specific design surfaces of famous websites? Search bars, comment threads, buttons, cards, feeds and timelines, tactile objects with drop shadows and border radii.
Those of us who remember the internet before it was subdivided, walled off and monetized by dripped out technology brothers recall messy walls of text, broken CSS styles and wild west forums. It was an unformed lump of clay. That preeminent age of the internet felt like staring into the eye of god, and watching Her wink back at you.
Digital amnesia is the phenomenon that, as search engines became prevalent, our neurology changed noticeably. Our brains started discarding information easily searchable, and other parts of our grey matter lit up.
Similarly, what type of plasticity is molded by a life of consuming digital design systems? That sense of harmony when we’ve organized our files neatly into folders, our expenses are neatly lined up in our budget spreadsheets, and our photos are sorted into their correct albums is a feeling Big UI™ wants us to crave for our lives to feel complete. We’re addicted to knolling our digital matter. Has this become a prison of thought?
Who benefits when the human experience is flattened into components, and those components streamlined for maximum engagement? The interfaces we inherit — buttons, cards, feeds, timelines — are deeply constrained by industrial logic. They smooth over contradiction and dissonance, sanding down the irregularities that make us human.
The logic of UI is not neutral. Every surface carries a disposition — a worldview. The user is quietly rewarded for conformity and punished for deviation. Try something unusual and you’re hit with a 404. These interfaces don’t just guide our behavior; they constrain our agency. UI shapes what we’re allowed to know, feel, or imagine.
So it's clear why luddite clubs are forming, the Bible Belt is Going Light, Index NYC is at capacity and we all want to be a trad wife with an upstate vegetable garden. We yearn to be unbound by the straightjacket of coercive torrents of data shapes, free and messy and writhing, returning to the real like the organic freaks of nature that we are.
When the Sparkle Emoji Fades
What if we didn’t have to contort ourselves to fit the systems we’re given? What if computers didn’t just obey us, but understood what we meant? We grew up with the internet, and we’ve come to know it as our home. But today, it only barely knows us as a cloud of marketing tags. What happens when it starts to understand our disjointed urges and incoherent patterns? Our deepest desires and our lifelong growth patterns?
Lately at XXIX, we’ve been asking ourselves: what would it be like to be truly known by a computer?
Over the past year, the sparkle emoji has become shorthand for “something magical is about to happen.” It blinks enticingly in from the bounds of a button or chat box: an invitation to engage with AI. The underlying premise is clear: type something in, and watch the machine do something amazing.
But these sparkle-marked interactions are often wrapped in traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) patterns: dropdowns, modals, input fields. Familiar, but not exactly natural. They require you to pause, shift cognitive modes, and ask yourself a strange, high-stakes question: How do I speak in a way the AI will understand?
Rather than us adapting to think like a computer, can the computer learn to think more like us?
Establishing Human-Computer Harmony
In the next frontier of design, we leave behind the square-peg-round-hole of human-computer interaction and transcend toward true human-computer harmony. To do this, we need to start designing adaptive, cognitive interfaces where human intuition and machine intelligence converge to deepen human-to-human connection.
As we move into this new era, interface design is shifting away from static features and top-down prompting. Emerging technology will allow us to train LLMs through lived context and nuanced data-ingestion patterns. The result will be new digital systems that anticipate our needs and integrate fluidly into our daily lives.
This shift demands new design questions:
What happens when UI dissolves and understanding takes its place?
How do we preserve human agency in systems that predict our desires before we express them?
What does product design look like when the input box disappears and the AI prompts us?
To design for this future, our team has begun thinking beyond features, and begun thinking in archetypes. These archetypal interface patterns enable us to imagine a more resilient, harmonious approach to building adaptive systems that learn through interaction and evolve with experience.
Each of these archetypes are based on the concept of the Digital Twin, a dynamic, agentic AI partner who matures through its human’s lived experience. Our digital twin engages us through patterns and situations that mirror how we live, work, and connect with each other, integrating naturally into our lives as a nebulous mesh, rather than a bunch of scattered, siloed data points.
Ambient, adaptive, sometimes even invisible, you won’t have to ask your Digital Twin to do something; it will already be halfway there, anticipating your needs like a true collaborator. As designers, this paradigm shift means we need to stop optimizing for clicks and flows, and begin fostering trust, intuition, and co-creation between humans and machines.
Here are some of the archetypes we’ve been exploring to do just that:
The Interviewer
The Interviewer helps the computer understand who you are by embedding data collection into natural, human moments. Instead of filling out yet another personality quiz, you’re having a real conversation — maybe with a friend, maybe with yourself. The AI listens in, but it also ambiently reads across your digital environment, picking up on subtle signals, patterns, and preferences. It gently prompts for clarity, curiosity, or deeper context. It draws from your ongoing dialogue, the apps in your daily rotation, and the rhythms of your life, using that understanding to enrich your experience across other archetypal patterns.
Importantly, this process respects your boundaries. Data is gathered with intention, stored with care, and always under your control.
Gone are the days of checking off fragments of our identities and personalities on intake forms and profile settings. Now, the computer learns through your lived experience, on your terms.
The Coach
The Coach steps in when you’re trying to grow, gently holding you accountable to the person you want to become. It watches your habits, surfaces better options in the moment, and helps you reflect — whether that’s rewriting a text message to better express your values or spotting patterns you’re trying to break. It’s like a therapist, a friend, and a mentor across your digital experiences, nudging you toward the version of yourself you’re reaching for.
The Liaison
The Liaison helps you connect deeply, meaningfully, and with intention. It translates who you are into relationships that matter: a matchmaker who knows your quirks, a recruiter who understands your values, a connector who spots resonance before you do. It offers subtle, context-rich insight that helps you feel seen and trust the people you’re being introduced to.
With nuanced autonomy over your data, you gain control over the level of context you wish to share, ensuring you’re represented in the light most authentic to your personality and values.
The Curator
The Curator transforms content from a one-way scroll into a two-way exchange. It stitches together the world around you (ideas, media, conversations) into a personalized stream that sparks curiosity, invites interruption, and evolves with your thinking. Whether it’s a podcast you can interrupt or a city map that understands what kind of day you want to have, The Curator goes beyond serving existing content the way an algorithm would, aligning with your current interests, passions, and intellectual pursuits.
The Sous-chef
The Sous-chef is a context-aware partner that understands your goals and offers timely, relevant suggestions to enhance your work. As you’re designing, animating, developing a recipe or producing music, it listens and offers thoughtful prompts, visual variations, or sonic adjustments to help you refine your vision and keep your ideas on track.
Imagine a world where you never miss a note from your client brief or forget the crucial detail that got lost in an email chain.
Digital Design for the Whole Human
For a long time, when interacting with a computer, we separated the logic-driven parts of ourselves from the emotional ones, conforming our modes of interaction to systems designed to take bits of us and turn them into useful patterns and user demographics.
In the new age of Human-Computer Harmony, we leave behind this false separation, merging disparate parts of ourselves into a holistic expression of our personhood in all its messiness, contradiction, and complexity.
By focusing on archetypes and designing systems that evolve with us, we create experiences that feel like intuitive, dynamic partners, empowering us to get weirder and more natural in the ways we make and express ourselves. Ultimately, this shift is about making it easier to connect deeply with other humans in an increasingly digitally-mitigated world, by way of more accessible, innate interactions with technology.
At XXIX, this is the future we’re thinking about. We’re a group of designers, strategists, and developers exploring the edge of what’s possible by asking critical questions, pushing past familiar patterns, and designing experiences based on ethics, insights, and care that feel distinctly human.
If you’re working on something ambitious, strange, or quietly revolutionary, we’d love to help. Our team is here to create systems that understand understand people. We’re looking for partners who are ready to start making these archetypes real, and begin designing the next generation of cognitive interfaces together.
 | A guest post by
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