Hi, I’m Julian. I design and build systems that shape how meaning, agency, and cognition get structured in human–machine interactions: systems where complexity becomes navigable, structure emerges from use, and interfaces adapt to context.
Currently I’m building recurse: a sense‑making substrate for both humans and AI. My work explores what I call Divergence Engines, Ephemeral Interfaces, and Auto‑Associative Workspaces — patterns for technology that maintains possibility space and keeps thinking alive.
My work focuses on the layers between computation and human sensemaking, where interpretation, cognition, and power quietly get encoded. My practice combines research, design, and concrete implementation to explore these questions in situ.
I come from HCI and interface design — building systems where tiny interaction choices decide what people notice, remember, and believe. Over the last decade the questions I explore have broadened. Less “better UI.” More: “epistemic infrastructure” — what technological architectures support humans in staying oriented when AI increasingly mediates cognition?
Divergence Engines
Substrates that resist collapse
Most systems optimize for convergence — the answer, the summary, the first plausible output. This track explores the opposite: substrates that resist premature closure. Technology that creates productive friction, maintains possibility space, and lets structure compound from interaction rather than getting imposed from above. Not just “emergent” — actively divergent. Counter-structures for an era where retrieval and generation quietly collapse into sameness.
Cognitive Cartographies
Knowledge as territory
Knowledge as territory, not inventory. These projects explore how spatial thinking and embodied cognition can make high-dimensional information landscapes navigable — leveraging wayfinding abilities we’ve evolved over millennia. Multi-scale navigation where you can move from overview to detail without losing orientation. Maps, not folders. Territories, not hierarchies.
Ephemeral Interfaces
Design as meta-discipline
When computation is cheap and context is deep, interfaces don’t have to be fixed objects. They can be temporary cognitive surfaces — assembled for a task, shaped by where you are in the loop, dissolved when done. What persists is not the UI but the substrate: traces, relationships, provenance. Design systems become grammar; interfaces become sentences generated for the situation. This track explores what happens when design becomes a meta-discipline — when we design the conditions for interface emergence rather than the interfaces themselves.
Cognitive Sovereignty
Agency in distributed cognition
What happens to agency when we delegate cognition to machines? Not simple binaries — open vs. closed, human vs. AI — but the scaffoldings that allow for synergies. Transparency over what shapes your attention. Ownership of externalized memory. Provenance you can trace. This track explores systems where humans stay oriented and empowered inside increasingly interconnected environments — and where collaboration (human-AI, human-human) compounds rather than fragments.
This site is less a portfolio and more a working notebook — a space where I trace the patterns behind systems that keep humans oriented inside model-mediated cognition. If something here resonates, let’s figure out how we can work together.