DG—R · Design Ground Research
Quiet the noise.
Keep your taste.
There is a lot of shouting about AI at the moment, and most of it seems designed to make you feel behind. My sense is that you aren’t behind; you’re tired of the noise, which is a different thing. So let’s sit down together: we’ll sort out what actually matters for the way you work, and you’ll leave with a couple of instruments worth keeping and a plan that sounds like you.
Book a 15-minute introduction →The noise
Every other day there is a new tool, and one more post promising that everything has changed. Someone in the studio swears by something you’ve never heard of, and underneath it all sits the quiet question of whether you’re keeping up.
What I find genuinely reassuring is that most of the panic is noise. The tools change every week, while the way you actually think about design, the converging and diverging, the layering and recombining, changes very little. Your taste and your point of view, formed over years of building things and watching ideas survive coordination meetings, are exactly the part of the work no machine can do; that, I’m convinced, is the currency now.
My job here is to turn the volume down, so you can hear yourself again.
What this actually is
Think of it as a long conversation with someone who has spent years in the thick of it, masterplans and deadlines included, and who happens to know the tools well. Out of that conversation comes a plan: a clear, unfussy sense of what deserves your attention and what you can safely ignore. Call it strategy if you like; I’d rather call it a plan that sounds like you.
The point, in the end, is to hand you a direction you believe in, and to leave you feeling like yourself again, on top of both your craft and your business.
How it works
- 01
The talk
We start with fifteen minutes of ordinary conversation, free of charge and free of any pitch. You tell me what’s been nagging you and what good would look like; I’ll offer a thought or two in return, and the beginning of a plan, whether or not we go any further.
- 02
Working together
If it feels right, we keep going. Over the first month the plan takes real shape, and the right two or three instruments quietly find their way into how you work; there is no homework, it simply happens as we go. After that I stay on call as a steady hand, someone to think out loud with as things shift, so that you stay ahead of the noise rather than chasing it.
Neither step commits you to the next; we go at your pace.
Who this is for
This is for designers and studios who are good at what they do and a little worn out by the AI circus; people who would rather keep their taste in charge and quietly get better, without lying awake wondering what they’re missing. If that sounds like you, you’re exactly who I had in mind.
Why me
I’ve spent twenty-odd years in design and design technology, first in Moscow and later in New York, with Gensler and Kiewit among others, on everything from single houses to Google’s workplaces. I have opened the scary new software on day one more times than I can count, and I know that small flutter of wondering whether this is the one that finally replaces me (so far it hasn’t been). I’m here to make the noise quieter and to put you back in charge.