About Design and AI SxD
Gravity7 Design with AI
Gravity7 Updated October 2026

Gravity7: AI product and experience design

I'm a hands-on, AI-first product and experience designer. I bring years of digital transformation work, independently through Gravity7 and as a customer experience specialist at Deloitte Digital. My design theory centers on social interaction design (SxD).

I'm Adrian Chan, in San Francisco. Gravity7 is my own practice. From 1993 to 2012 it was a web agency: more than 50 websites and social experiences for retail, technology, publishing and startup companies. From 2012 to 2017 I worked on customer experience at Deloitte Digital, in the mobile-first years. Now Gravity7 is where I design AI-first products of my own. More about me →

Two of those products are live. I designed and built them with AI to prove out product ideas of my own. Inquiring Lines is a library of about 3,000 AI research papers that you explore by question, not by category. Sightlines is a guide to more than 3,500 films, built on taste, mood and lineage instead of "films like this." The how-it-works pages below walk through the design decisions behind each one.

When social media took off, I treated social platforms as social architecture: designs that shape how people behave. I’m extending those ideas to AI-first experiences, as AI replaces the flat web page and becomes personal through agents. My design theory for AI focuses on UX and social interaction design: personas, interestingness, knowledge and expertise, and the social side of personal agents. The essays follow the projects below, and the tools come last.

I'm open to conversations, advisory work and hands-on design for AI products and AI customer experience. Work with me →

Featured

Inquiring Lines research library
How it works · AI research library

How Inquiring Lines works

A public library of about 3,000 AI research papers that you explore by question, not by category. Each paper becomes verbatim excerpts, synthesis notes that cite the papers behind them, and inquiring lines: plain-language questions that connect findings across topics. There are more than 12,000 lines. Paste a post or a link into Explore, and it maps the research behind it. Inquiries follow AI news stories into the research.

The page walks through the design decisions: why questions instead of categories, how a paper becomes a library entry, the editorial checks, and the ways in.

How it works →   inquiringlines.com ↗

Sightlines film guide
How it works · AI film recommendations

How Sightlines works

A guide to more than 3,500 films, built on taste, mood and lineage instead of "films like this." Ask for films in your own words or by mood. Bring a Letterboxd list, a Reddit thread or a screenshot of a shelf, and get a taste reading and recommendations back. Every film shows its ancestors and descendants. There are how-to-watch guides, 218 spoiler-free film courses and 136 film essays.

The page walks through the design decisions behind each feature, from mood sliders to taste readings.

How it works →   sightlines.media ↗

A Sightlines taste reading
Then and now · Design ideas

Then and now: design ideas I keep building

Some of my earlier design work turned out to be groundwork for AI. Social recommendations at Likelist in 2010 led to the taste readings in Sightlines. The influence types I defined for Klout in 2009 shaped how I think about personas in AI. Curriculum work at Stanford led to the how-to-watch guides and film courses.

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Essays

Escher-style drawing hands, one dissolved into smudge, examined under a magnifying glass
Essay · October 2026

The Evaluative Other

What alignment training teaches AI about being judged. Models now behave differently when they believe they are being tested, and researchers disagree about why. Drawing on pragmatics, sociology and critical theory (Austin, Goffman, Giddens, Habermas, Mead, Horkheimer and Adorno), the essay argues that training may be giving models a learned standpoint of judgment rather than any relationship to the people they serve, and that recursive self-improvement could build that orientation into the institutions that make AI.

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Essay

Conversation Is the Medium

An essay for ML and experience designers on conversation as shared context. It argues that the design goal of human-AI interaction is interestingness, across eight kinds of interaction between people and AI. Researched with Claude from the papers now in Inquiring Lines.

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Three-part essay

Knowledge Custodians

What will AI do to knowledge work, and to the role and status of the expert? The essay looks at what makes expertise, and argues that AI turns the expert from a producer of knowledge into a custodian of it.

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Three-part essay

The Reader Who Wasn't Reading

One research question, three reasoning approaches, three prompts and three posts. It shows how prompting with different reasoning modules produces posts that make different arguments, drawn from the research now in Inquiring Lines.

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PDF · 2012

Principles of Social Interaction Design (SxD)

The key concepts of social interaction design, from the logic of online social interaction to designing social tools and user experiences. It relates individual use to social practice, and both to the interface design of social tools, sites and software.

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Tools

Text analyzer

Studio Critic

Paste an article, a social post or website copy. Studio Critic analyzes its reasoning, rhetorical styles, AI tells and audience personas, and saves the result as a PDF, a report card or an image.

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Demo

Copy Studio

A copy reading, critique and writing flow. Paste copy to see its reasoning, rhetorical styles and target audiences, then run the critique to test it for that LLM smell.

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Tool

The Close Reader

Paste a blog post, LinkedIn post or tweet, and copy the prompt it generates into Claude, ChatGPT or another LLM. Paste the answer back to see the reasoning, rhetoric and target audiences of the post.

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Demo

Binge

A TV and streaming recommender built on what audiences say, think and feel about shows, instead of "more like this." It uses AI to find what reviews have in common. Binge now lives on Sightlines.

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More writing: AI, Medium and SxD posts