I am Adrian Chan, an independent product designer and content creator in San Francisco. I design and build digital experiences with AI at their core: content pipelines, publishing systems, admin tools and interfaces that use AI to make large bodies of content interesting to explore and useful to the people who come to them. I started in content development and interactive design for educational multimedia, including the award-winning interactive laser disc of Ken Burns's The Civil War and a cartoon-making toolkit that won an Oracle Challenge Grant. I then spent fifteen years as a web designer and developer, helped define social interaction design (SxD) in the 2000s, and built a customer experience team at Deloitte Digital. Generative AI brings all of that together: content design, interaction design and the design of social experience now meet in products that read, write and converse.
I learned what AI can do by using it to build. Since 2023 I have read some three thousand AI white papers, on conversational AI, reasoning, recommender systems, agents, personas, alignment and more. Rather than keep them in a private vault, I ported them to a public site, Inquiring Lines, so that anyone could explore the research by topic and by question. It holds more than 2,300 papers excerpted verbatim, a synthesis note for each finding that cites the papers behind it, and thousands of inquiring lines: plain-language research questions that connect findings across topics, so a reader can follow a question rather than a keyword. Visitors can search by question, browse by topic or cluster, or paste an arXiv link or a social post into the Match page to see the research it bears on. Inquiries follow AI news stories, such as a frontier model escaping its sandbox or the debate over whether alignment still works, into the research behind them.
Sightlines exists because I am a film fan and wanted to work with content I know well, to see what AI can do when it is used for a compelling user experience rather than a chat window. It is a guide to 3,400 important and popular films, each read for what it is about, how it feels, what it descends from and what it shaped, with 136 film essays and 200 spoiler-free film courses. Visitors ask for films by mood, bring their own films (a Letterboxd list, a Reddit thread or a screenshot of a shelf), take a taste reading for personalized recommendations, and save lists and watchlists.
Both sites run on systems I designed and built with Claude. New material moves through an intake pipeline, AI-assisted analysis with editorial checks, and publishing; semantic search, admin consoles, analytics and social posting sit on top; each site serves well over ten thousand pages. The point of all that machinery is the experience on the other side: question-led navigation in one, mood, taste and lineage in the other. The case studies on Inquiring Lines and Sightlines describe what went into each.
This is the work I now offer clients. If you have a body of content, whether research, a catalog, a course or an archive, and want to make it explorable and useful with AI, I can design the experience and build the system behind it, drawing on UI, UX, customer experience, social interaction design, content design and educational content development. See Consulting and engagements.
I also write about AI, language and design. The Design and AI section collects essays such as The Evaluative Other and Knowledge Custodians, and the Obsidian, Prompts and Modular Reasoning pages describe how I research and write with Claude. My view is that the user-experience questions in AI (persona, presence, conversation, trust, interestingness) are as consequential as the engineering questions, and building these sites is how I test that view in practice.
From 2012 to 2017 I was at Deloitte Digital, where I helped recruit and build a customer experience team bridging the firm's studio and onsite consulting. That work involved crafting internal and client-facing documentation, methods, and deliverables across a wide range of engagements. I returned to independent consulting in 2017. In twenty-plus years of consulting I have run an online dating service, built websites both large and small, designed content management systems, branded companies, and written countless requirements specs and architecture documents. My writings on social interaction design have been referenced by designers and developers interested in frameworks for online social interaction, and I was a long-time member of SNCR.
View my resume (pdf).
I graduated from Stanford University with honors in International Relations in 1988. Outside of work, my interests include film, music, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, continental sociology, guitar, cycling, and photography.
Awards & notables
- Workshop: What is Social Interaction Design? CHI 2007.What is Social Interaction Design?
- Panelist at the Milken Institute Global Conference, April 2006.: Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education
- 2003 Maggie Finalist Best Online Publication Home Page Design, Best Overall Online Design, Best Online Publication for Yoga Journal.
- 2002 Maggie Winner Best Online Publication for Yoga Journal
- Best Educational Technology Product The Civil War, by Ken Burns. Interactive Laser Disc.
- Oracle Challenge Grant $100,000 winner for a cartoon-making toolkit.