Design, at its core, should bring forth experiences that resonate beyond mere functionality, inviting us to engage, reflect and connect. As Vallgårda observed in 2014, computers are no longer the centre of attention; the interface has disappeared, and what we design is the object or environment in which a computer is used [1]. With the rise of agentic systems like LLMs, even those purposes are being automated away. The skills, decisions and agency once owned by the human are increasingly offloaded to systems that decide for us, at a pace that is unprecedented and largely unexamined.

This is dangerous, not because the systems are malicious, but because agency and judgement are practised, not granted [4]. Every small decision is a rehearsal of the capacity to make larger ones. Remove the small decisions and you atrophy the muscle that lets someone act, decide and become their own individual. I feel this concretely. In music production, generative tools now can finish a track before the muscisian has decided what they wanted, removing the struggle through which taste is formed. In daily life, where I eat, where I travel and what is worth seeing is increasingly mediated by algorithmic recommendations, narrowing my world to what others have already validated.

Designers have to address this directly. If the object is no longer a computer, should it act like one? If decision-making is increasingly offloaded, how do we design encounters that keep people in the loop of deciding?

Keeping people in the loop of deciding requires interfaces that make computational behaviour understanable and negotioable [3]. With computing entering the physical world, these systems ought to leverage the same way we humans interact, by dynamic expression, movement, subtleties, sound, and touch.

Sound and haptics are central to this because they communicate in ways screens cannot. Sound unfolds over time; haptics are bodily and immediate. Both operate peripherally, reduce visual dependence, and convey state, rhythm, urgency, resistance or confirmation [2]. They make invisible behaviour feel present, and in doing so they give the person a surface to read, question and act on. My work explores this through multimodal interaction design: making computational systems audible, tangible and experienceable without taking judgement away from the user.

I bring this vision into the world through two connected actions.

In practice, by working as a designer and engineer on multimodal interfaces in industries where intelligent systems are becoming embedded in real products.

In knowledge, by articulating principles that travel beyond the case at hand, so the lessons of designing for embodied judgement in one context can inform the next.

If the next generation of intelligent products is designed to disappear from screens into the physical, people will live inside systems that decide on their behalf, and the capacity to decide at all will quietly weaken. If those products are designed to be legible through the body, people stay in the act of judging, deciding and acting with intention. That is the future I want to contribute to: not technology that fades into automation, but systems that keep human judgement in the room.