Helen & Dave Edwards: Becoming Synthetic

We enjoyed giving a virtual keynote for the Autonomous Summit on December 4, 2025, titled Becoming Synthetic: What AI Is Doing To Us, Not Just For Us.

We talked about our research on how to maintain human agency & cognitive sovereignty, the philosophical question of what it means to be human, and our new(ish) approach to create better AI tools called unDesign.

unDesign is not the absence of design nor is it anti-design. It's design oriented differently. The history of design has been a project of reducing uncertainty. Making things legible. Signaling affordances. Good design means you never have to wonder what to do.

Undesign inverts this and uses "uns" as design material. The unknown. The unpredictable. The unplanned. These aren't bugs. They're the medium where value actually lives. Because uncertainty is the condition of genuine encounter.

unDesign doesn't design outcomes—it designs the space where outcomes can emerge.

You can watch the full keynote below. Check it out!