About

This work comes from Canada—currently Victoria, British Columbia. The thinking has been shaped by years in Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, by a stint in San Francisco during the first dot-com era, by Japanese aesthetics of restraint and consideration, and by collaborations across the globe.

Indigenous law concepts of respect and enablement remain ongoing influences, not foundational claims. Thirty years in technology, a background in Pacific and Asian studies, and the persistent gap between what technology could be and what it typically becomes.

Applied Humanism isn't thought leadership. It's applied phenomenology for technology: asking how things actually feel to use, whether they expand or diminish human capability, and what it would take to build differently.

The Core Declaration

Do things that make people's lives better in all ways.

This isn't a mission statement or a brand position. It's a filter for decisions: Does this thing I'm about to build actually make life better? In what ways might it make life worse? What would it take to build differently?

Three Questions

All the work here organizes around three questions:

• How do we learn? — Understanding how people actually acquire understanding—not how systems assume they do.
• How do we think together? — The patterns and practices that enable groups to become more than the sum of their parts.
• How do we gain agency? — Building technology that expands human choice rather than circumventing it.