About
I am interested in ways people perceive the world and interact with the world and in the stories and designs that enhance those interactions.
ap2studio.com is a digital basecamp of a multidisciplinary designer Alen Puaca
I design multiple aspects of brand experiences including brand identity, products, data, events, and spaces. Occasionally I write design philosophy essays that come from my interest in phenomenology, wisdom traditions, complexity, and cognitive sciences.
I have had opportunities to contribute designs to large scale spatial attractions and events, Olympic ceremonies, and museums around the world, and to collaborate with stellar entrepreneurs and design professionals, including Disney Imagineers veterans. In the past decade focus has shifted to various software startups and established digital products covering
Visual Design: Brand Identity, Marketing Colateral, Storytelling
Product Design: Digital Products, Space & Events Design, Data Design
Strategic Design: Brand Sprints, Service Design, User Journeys
I often collaborate with my teams through design thinking framework, by facilitating design sprints, brand sprints, or service design exercises. These exercises along with systems thinking approach often afford emergence of novel and useful solutions that are not always initially visible to the participants.
-
Double Helix Design Patterns
Double Helix Design Patterns provide an overview of the recursive ways living things make decisions, create value, manage limited resources, interact with others, store and use learnings, and tap into their creative potential. Design emerges from the multi-perspectival understanding of an agent as a system and immersion in the context environment the agent is a part of.
-
Biologist Stuart Kauffman’s Lessons for 21st Century Designers
“Mattering is now part of the universe. Agency introduces meaning in the world. Agency is fundamental to life.”
Kauffman’s ideas challenge traditional scientific thinking, which emphasizes reductionism and determinism. Instead, he believes that life is too complex to be reduced to a single theory or cause-and-effect relationship. His views emphasize the importance of emergence and self-organization in biological, social, and economic complex systems.
-
Michael Levin’s Key Lessons for 21st Century Designers
Cognitive science work of Michael Levin is invaluable in understanding how the decision-making living systems function.
Rather than focusing solely on human, bacterial, or machine cognition, Levin’s work explores “scale-free cognition” as a fractal pattern. This pattern applies equally to very small systems and highly complex ones, from human organisms to synthetic AI systems, and even “alien” cognitive systems of undefined substrate.
Get in touch
Reach out for a design inquiry or feedback.