Hi! Aran here...

I'm a researcher and builder of interactive systems, with a particular interest in persuading users to trust their computers less: not to accept unthinkingly the first result a system offers, but instead to feel an urge to explore... at least a little. More about my career to date.

My recent engagement with AI assistants treats them not just as a means of speeding up my system-building work, but also as a new domain offering powerful ways to understand and shape our informational environments: a domain where, more than ever, it's important for users to experience that urge to look beyond first answers. Recently I built an interactive piece touching on this, for an open art show.

My long-running research focus has been on designing interfaces that reveal the context around any computed response, by showing how small changes to the request would have affected the outcome. Because they show how things would have turned out if you had asked differently, I call these subjunctive interfaces. I continued this theme through my years at Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute (until its closure in 2017), applying it to examples in design, simulation and search.

I also architect and build production software platforms. After Viewpoints I co-founded Croquet Corporation, where I helped develop a platform for collaborative web applications, and various domain-specific frameworks built on top of it; some highlights from that journey are here. My biggest single contribution was in building out the global infrastructure that managed a network of thousands of community-provided Croquet reflector nodes.

Find me on GitHub, Twitter and LinkedIn, or email aran at acm dot org.