Introduction
Work
Testimonials

About     Design and AI     SxD


Introduction

I am Adrian Chan, a San Francisco-based consultant working at the intersection of user experience design and generative AI. My background began in content development and interactive design in multimedia, then as a web developer and designer. With the arrival of social media and social tools, I established myself as a thought leader in social interaction design, or SxD — the application of insights from psychology, sociology, and linguistics to the user experience design of social tools. SxD treats social platforms as a kind of online architecture, in which design features, elements, and algorithms propagate user behaviors shaped by the particular kind of social presence people experience online. Generative AI extends that design tradition into a new medium, and most of my current work is about what that extension actually requires.

Large language models have opened new opportunities, and new design challenges, for the user experience of AI. Interaction with AI is built around natural language, which means that language, rather than layout or screen, becomes the interface. That is a profound shift for designers willing to invest the time to understand how generative AI actually works. My own view is that the user-experience questions in AI — persona, presence, conversation, trust, interestingness, and the subtler ways a model's behavior shapes what a user thinks it can do — are as consequential as the engineering questions, and the design field has been slow to take them up. Much of my writing on this site is an argument for, and a worked example of, what taking them up looks like in practice.

Since 2023 I have been reading widely in the AI research literature — over 2,500 white papers to date, across conversational AI, reasoning, recommender systems, agent design, personas and alignment, domain specialization, and more. I now do that reading inside an Obsidian vault, where excerpts from the papers are organized under roughly 90 thematic categories and, through the arscontexta plugin, cross-linked by around 900 topic notes. I use Claude, running against the vault, as a research and writing collaborator. The combination has let me move from reading about AI to writing from a working research base, with a modular reasoning playbook shaping how the model investigates and argues. Obsidian, Prompts, and Modular Reasoning pages describe the setup; the Articles on AI section shows what the setup produces.

What tends to be distinctive about my work in this space is that I read deeply across both sides of it. I am a designer with more than three decades of experience shipping digital products, but I am also reading current work on mechanistic interpretability, reinforcement-learning post-training, emergent reasoning, and alignment. I have long-standing interests in continental sociology, communication theory, and linguistics — particularly around how language mediates social interaction — and those interests translate directly to how I think about conversational AI. Most UX and design people are not yet reading the AI literature at that depth. Most ML researchers are not reading the sociology. A fair amount of what I do, on this site and with the clients I work with, lives in the overlap.

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







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