Petafloptimism is my personal blog. It has been running, under one name or another, since June 2000 — which makes it older than most of the companies I’ve worked for, and very nearly the oldest thing in this portfolio.
The tagline is “a matter of matter battles”. The subject is whatever happens to be holding my attention: experience design, machine intelligence, cities as systems, the texture of time, science fiction, and the long, strange process by which new technologies become ordinary.
A quarter-century of thinking out loud
The blog started in 2000 as a way to think in public — to work out ideas where other people could see them, argue with them, and build on them. That habit has shaped everything else I’ve done since.
A lot of what later became formal work — talks, products, design directions — first appeared here as a half-formed post. The BERG ideas about a “robot-readable world”, the Google work on ambient and on-device AI, the recent Miro AI manifesto: all of them have roots in writing I did here first.
Why keep it going
Platforms have come and gone — and the blog has outlived most of them. It has survived the rise and fall of RSS readers, the centralising pull of social media, and several complete rebuilds of the web itself. Keeping a single, durable home for two and a half decades of writing feels more valuable now, not less.
It’s a place to:
- Develop ideas slowly, over years, rather than in the churn of a feed.
- Keep a personal archive that I own and control.
- Write at whatever length an idea actually needs.
- Connect threads across decades — a 2003 post and a 2025 one often turn out to be about the same thing.
Selected writing
A few pieces that have travelled furthest, grouped by the threads I keep pulling on.
Designing with machine intelligence
- Centaurs not Butlers — why the best human–AI relationship is a partnership, not a servant.
- Optometrists, Octopii, Rubber Ducks & Centaurs — my TU Delft talk wrapping up six years designing for AI at Google Research.
- “Magic notebooks, not magic girlfriends” — on Apple Intelligence and what we actually want from personal AI.
- The beginning of BotWorld — Little Printer and the dawn of small, domestic AIs.
- Gooey-Prickles or Prickly-Goo — Alan Watts as a lens on precision versus vagueness in design.
- Vibe-designing — using LLMs as an expressive design material.
Futures, energy and abundance
- Keeping up with the Kardashevians — reframing the energy transition from sustainability to abundance.
- Donuts and Dyson Spheres — degrowth, growth, and the Chobani Cinematic Universe.
- Maximum Happy Imagination — on the limits of how we picture the future.
- From punctuated futures to permafuture — reclaiming the word “future” from late capitalism.
- Lost futures: Unconscious gestures? — the embodied mobile interactions the iPhone short-circuited.
Infrastructure, cities and pop culture
- Who Stole My Volcano? — the dematerialisation of supervillain architecture.
- The Bourne Infrastructure — borders, Schengen, and the late-capitalist non-place.
Making, teams and a life in the work
- The “Oh, Shit…” and the birth of BBC News Online — where best-laid plans meet reality, and the “matter battle”.
- Get Excited and Make Things! — the story behind the poster.
- Bye Dopplr — a fond farewell as Nokia switched it off.
- 5 things I’m thinking about — a BERG-era scratchpad on ubicomp, peak resources and resilience.
If there’s a through-line to my work, it probably started here — the conviction that you understand things best by writing them down where someone might disagree with you.
Read it at petafloptimism.com.