Chris Harris

Professional Praxis

For over two decades I've produced digital experiences and designed & developed digital interactions, with a focus on distributed social technology and ecological planetary intelligence.

I work most often as an independent consultant offering workshops and work sprints.

as a producer in residence to help teams manage complex, creative, collaborative projects, aligning team experience and enthusiasm, to go from vision and mission to plans and prototypes.
as a technical product designer to help teams discover, de-risk, and deliver new features for innovation and product-market-fit.
and as a product manager, facilitator, software engineer, artist, researcher, and writer.

Selected History

2009 - A.I. Studied A.I. at University of Leeds, UK. Practicing Human-Computer-Interaction design, bio-mimicry, natural language processing, computer vision and general computer science.
2012 - R&D. Cut my teeth in the R&D of professional software at a boutique radio-systems engineering lab designing mesh systems for first responders where I worked in full-stack web software and embedded systems engineering.
2017 - Startups. Through enough failures I learnt that we all have deeply entrenched design biases, that real life mechanisms are complex, socially-dynamic systems, and that product visions only fruit when nurtured through feedback, and positioned & shaped to their natural niche, and that teams only excel with clear communication, safety, support, and feedback.
2019+ Collaborations & Consultations as below

Selected Collaborations & Consultations

Technical/Social Product Design, Production Strategy, Code, Communication and more.

LabDAO

2022-08-01

Strategy & Facilitation

Labdao is a platform for distributed scientific research and development. I was approached to help them with strategic and technical communication. I helped them move gears from visioning to production; aligning a distributed team towards an actionable mission and developing participatory strategy and culture.

Worked with the CEO and CTO, to distill the platform vision into an interim product strategy.
Lead interviews with stakeholders and scientists to develop a product roadmap and contribute technical specifications.
Worked closely to onboard their new head of product.
Facilitated a culture of effective team meetings and async constructive coordination.

(Exact details omitted for privacy)

Regen Network

2022-05-01

Product Design Facilitation

Regen Networks steward a platform for providing, supporting, and developing distributed ecological services.

Working closely with the science team at Regen Networks, I lead a product design process to distill complex opportunities into simple sequential bets, experiments, and a disambiguated production plan for current platform improvements and a future innovative product initiative.

Lead workshops and interviews with stakeholders in science, product, business, and community.
Compiled a product strategy document over multiple rounds of gathering expert team feedback.
Designed initial mockups with feedback from in house UI designers.
Investigated technical feasibility
Presented an initial product roadmap and further report of strategic opportunities.

(Exact details omitted for privacy)

Acoustic Gardens

2022-03-01

Production, Art, Code

The 'Acoustic Gardens' demo app, originated from a jam session I facilitated with creative friends Sarah Friend, and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez. We explored concepts in planetary-human-computer-interaction for alternative ecologies of more-than-human sensing, representation, stewardship, and economics.

We won the Sovereign Nature Hackathon in 2022. With further commission from Sovereign Nature Initiative I produced the interactive app with Sarah Friend and we demoed it at the experimental showcase at De Cuevel.

I worked on Production, Facilitation, Art, Code, 3D, and Presentation.

Creative Technology

An interactive web app guides a player through a direct encounter to record audio of bird activity. Responding with species and biodiversity feedback. The contribution of biogenic audio recordings grow an animist representation of the relationship to 'the spirit of a place' through a site specific Genius Loci. These abstract 3D spirits spawn into life pixelated, hardly discernable, and through repeated listening, appear into clearer view.

WorldBrain/Memex

2021-08-01

Product Engineering

WorldBrain build open source research tools for personal knowledge management and collaborative intelligence.

While consulting for WorldBrain in product & engineering, I lead efforts in research, development, communications and overall digital product strategy.

I prototyped features to improve the product and architecture.
I lead team R&D cycles towards product-market fit.
In weekly sparring sessions with the CEO I guided open questions, refined specifications, and prioritized fixes, features, and technical debt.

Product Research & Development

E.G: Extending annotations from web pages to multiple media formats.

For the informed and participatory R&D of features such as this I:

Conducted user development interviews
Gathered audience analysis
Created behavioural personas and jobs to be done
Investigated technical feasibility
Proposed an iterative refactoring to an improved technical architecture
Scoped work packages in shippable modules
Created a strategic roadmap for launching and continued maintenance
Developed functioning prototypes

Extensible annotations (initially: PDF Annotations) was launched with a roadmap of transitioning to a resilient and scalable technical architecture to support multiple media formats.

GitHub PR 1152

Software Engineering

Early in my engagement with WorldBrain I did much software engineering to help put out fires.

Front End To alleviate regressions I lead team efforts to refactor unruly UI components. I made UI controls more modular, testable, performant and error-free for an easier developer experience and successful user experience. I also did profiling and performance tuning to speed up UI interactions.

GitHub 948

GitHub 1003

GitHub 1030

Back End Architecture In an advisory capacity I often assisted to the CTO in providing architectural feedback and in de-risking, and aligning the team on big architectural changes, E.G. a new cloud storage implementation. In a development capacity I refactored bottlenecks in maintainability and performance across legacy architecture e.g. underlying remote procedure call architecture.

GitHub PR 873

GitHub 1069

Strategic Communications

Regularly I would document latest user insights and strategic directions to for internal team alignment, through Slack memos and Notion tasks. I also started an initiative to consolidate the strategy into external communications. In the research report I contributed much of the research and writing to sections 'Who are we building for', 'Where does the product fits in your network', and 'Workflows being optimised for' (roadmap).

Research Report

Earlier works

Earlier Works

Neural Net Car Removal

2019-05-01

Generative Art

Over the course of a few short weeks, I worked on several self-directed art experiments in machine learning.

The last attempt: biophillic visions, was well received with 4 Million views on Twitter.

YouTube

Girls in Tech: Hacking for Humanity

2018-12-01

Hackathon Prize

We won hackathon prizes for Best Overall Hack and Most Innovative for the invention of an educational mobile app for inter-species communication.

I lead our small team through the requirements, design, development and pitching as we responded to the brief.

Learning from the previous year's hackathon, I 'reverse-engineered' the judging panel's interests to seed the best narrative and functional requirements. Combining 'user' research, storytelling and technical execution.

GitHub

ProYou.app

2018-11-01

Founder, CEO, CTO

ProYou was a startup producing a conversational mobile app for positive behavioural change.

I learned invaluable lessons about the cognitive biases in research & development, the art of storytelling & pitching, the user experience of A.I. and amoung all the myriad of socio-technical-business insights - a necessity for team and community.

Activities as CEO & CTO

Conducted market research, ethnography, competitor reviews, user questionnaires and user interviews to drive product features.
Managed the budget, runway, technical complexity, feedback, and road-map.
Business administration and incorporation.
Worked with apprentices, freelancers and agencies to coordinate tasks in design and marketing.
Prepared pitch presentations and investor prospectus documents, spoke to investors, took meetings and interviews including with YCombinator.
Developed a cross-platform mobile app in Flutter with custom Android Java and iOS Swift plugins.
Developed a real-time, cloud back-end, with Firebase including document database schema, storage policies, security, caching.
Interfaced with Google's DialogFlow for online voice recognition, speech generation and natural language understanding.
Developed a bespoke graphical conversation designer that compiled to a custom state-machine dialog engine, for fast, offline, scripted chat.

Developing state-of-the-art software while upskilling on product design and attempting to understand business development is not something I would ever attempt single-handedly again - the solution rightly failed to find product market fit, though the grey hairs retain much wisdom.

University of Leeds

2011-07-01

BSc Artificial Intelligence

Studying A.I. at university included fundamental computer science plus modelling intelligence and other complex bio-inspired adaptations. The polygot of programming languages, tools, and logical frameworks was formative to my R&D practice in interactive and bio-inspired computation.

Interests and learnings

Since the MRI & BCI time was in too high demand to allow me to explore the computational neuroscience of meditation, I spent my time simulating worm brains, making augmented reality games, developing bots conversing in natural language and modeling inference in computer vision.

I left more capable in intelligence engineering but disillusioned in the growing popular narrative of anthropocentric 'A.I.' intelligence and it's use cases.

Work With Me

Please get in touch to explore collaborative innovations in product design, engineering, culture, and other creative HCIs.

Email me via hello at harrischris.com

To Serve a

intelligent, compassionate, thriving, computational planet.