Adrian Chan is a hands-on, AI-first product and experience designer in San Francisco. He brings years of digital transformation work, independently through his practice, Gravity7, and as a customer experience specialist at Deloitte Digital. His design theory centers on social interaction design (SxD), and today he applies it to AI.
Education and curriculum
Adrian studied International Relations at Stanford University and graduated with honors in 1988. He then held a Krupp Fellowship at the Free University of Berlin in 1989. As program coordinator at SPICE, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, in 1988 and again from 1989 to 1991, he published 12 curriculum units on US–Soviet relations and Eastern Europe.
That began about five years as a content creator, educational content designer and curriculum developer, at SPICE, Scholastic and Illumina. At Illumina he designed the content and wrote the teacher and student curricula for the PBS videodisc of Ken Burns's The Civil War, which won the NAB Crystal Award for best educational technology product. He designed games for the Hyperman children's CD-ROMs (CBS, 1995), backed by Sony, IBM and CBS, and at Scholastic helped shape the company's early new media strategy and produced an electronic book on CD-ROM. He also won a $100,000 Oracle Challenge Grant for a cartoon-making toolkit.
In the mid-1990s he moved to the web: a partner at Illumina Online, doing online strategy and creative direction for PBS, CBS/Sony and others; creative director at Luminaire, on enhanced CDs for A&M and Warner Music; and a partner at SF-Bay Matchmaker, the Bay Area's leading online dating site, where he built its community features.
Gravity7, a web agency
From 1993 to 2012, Gravity7 was Adrian's web agency. It built more than 50 websites and social experiences for retail, technology, publishing and startup companies, among them Smith & Hawken, Reel.com, Sierra Designs, Yoga Journal, Webvan and NEC. The Yoga Journal site won a Maggie award in 2002.
Social interaction design
In the 2000s Adrian helped define social interaction design. He treated social networks and platforms as social architecture, designs that shape how people behave, and brought social theory into user experience design: how people project themselves online, keep up an online self and a reputation, and use social media for personal purposes. He now extends those ideas to AI-first experiences. He wrote Principles of Social Interaction Design (2012) and founded the SxD Salon, a shared blog with industry leaders on the subject. He spoke at IxDA12 in Dublin and was a panelist at the Milken Institute Global Conference in 2006. For Klout he defined its 16 influence types, from an original set of four. Much of his client work was on recommendations: a recommendation-system demo for France Telecom/Orange that won its R&D innovation award out of 156 internal projects, a movie recommendation site built on its users' film expertise for TrustedOpinion, and social recommendations and lists for Likelist. His writing appeared in Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Johnny Holland, and he was a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
Deloitte Digital
From 2012 to 2017 Adrian was a Specialist Master in customer experience at Deloitte Digital. He helped recruit and build a client-facing team of UX and CX designers, who carried client needs from the onsite consulting teams to the studio design teams. He contributed to the go-to-market for digital transformation in the mobile-first years. He led web, mobile and ecommerce work for clients including Agilent, Atlassian, Chevron, Cisco, Intel and TOMS.
AI products of his own
Since 2023 Adrian has learned generative AI by building with it. He designed and built two AI-powered sites with AI, both launched in 2026, to prove out product ideas of his own. Inquiring Lines is a public 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. The Inquiring Lines and Sightlines pages explain how each one works.
Writing
Adrian writes about what UX and interaction design bring to AI. The Evaluative Other asks what alignment training teaches AI about being judged. Conversation Is the Medium argues that interestingness is the design goal of human-AI interaction. Knowledge Custodians looks at what AI does to expertise. Personas Impersonated reads AI personas as a matter of communication rather than of what the model is.
Speaking topics
- Designing AI for interestingness. Why conversation is the medium, and what makes an AI worth talking to.
- The evaluative other. What alignment training teaches AI about being judged, and why it matters for the people it serves.
- Knowledge custodians. What happens to experts and expertise when AI produces the knowledge.
- AI personas. Personas as a design material, seen from interaction design rather than from the debate over what models are.
- Social interaction design for AI. What twenty years of designing social software teaches about personal agents.
- Building AI products as a designer. Lessons from Inquiring Lines and Sightlines on what AI does well in a user experience and where it needs design.
Outside work
Adrian lives in San Francisco. He is a film fan, which is why Sightlines exists, and his interests include music, philosophy, linguistics, continental sociology, guitar, cycling and photography.
To invite Adrian to speak, contact him on LinkedIn. His résumé is here as a PDF.