About

👋 I'm Narayan Ashanahalli, a Product Designer & Prototyper building [0-to-1] experiences across AI, hardware, and digital infrastructure. With a foundation in architecture, I apply systems thinking and rapid prototyping to create digital products that feel responsive and grounded in existing ecosystems.

🎯 The question I keep coming back to: how do we make technology feel present in the physical world rather than extracting people into screens? I care about interactions that feel natural, where the interface fades and people focus on what they're actually doing.

🔧 I'm currently working as a Design Researcher at Lab 4 Cybernetics with Paul Pangaro, building the lab's digital infrastructure: the website, a practitioner-scholar matching platform, and a knowledge graph system organizing cybernetics concepts.

🤖 My thesis project, supported by the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund, explores how physically embodied AI can provide spatial task assistance through laser-pointing, bridging LLM reasoning with physical spatial referencing.

💡 I'm learning that the best design work happens in the infrastructure: building repositories, systems, and tools that let others create and scale. I want to build tools that feel like extensions of how people naturally think and interact, not systems they have to manage.