I’ve made a new website called the Design Research Playground. It’s a home for tools, demos and experiments, or put more simply, things to twiddle with.
Working with AI agents makes it possible to prototype concepts very quickly, especially digital or software concepts. Ideas that would once have sat in a notebook for months, waiting for the time or the budget or the right collaborator, can now become something you can click on in an afternoon. That changes what’s worth trying. If making a prototype costs very little, you can afford to make one just to see what happens, and you can afford for some of them not to work.
The Playground is an evolving archive of those experiments. Some use AI, some were built with it, and all of them begin with a question. Can you make an image editor that runs in a terminal? What does it feel like to talk to an AI through a rubber duck? Can you learn anything about polycules by borrowing the mechanics of a sushi card game? (Not much, as it turns out, but that’s useful to know too.)
What's in there so far
There are eight experiments at the moment.
- News Collector, turning links into newsletter copy through a short conversation
- PThinkTank, prompting an LLM by moving fish around a tank
- Dubber Ruck, thinking aloud with an animated rubber duck
- GOPOLYCULEGO, a card-drafting game about building a polycule
- Climb Out, a multiplayer paragliding card game
- Data Dots, an interactive atlas of hand-drawn survey responses
- Termshop, an image editor in a terminal
- Ups and Downs, endlessly rising and falling Shepard tones
They’re deliberately rough around the edges. Each one is there to be played with, poked at and occasionally broken, rather than used as a finished product. Some need an API key once the free allowance runs out, and a few are definitely best on a desktop, but every project page explains what you’ll need.
I see this as a kind of research through design sketchbook, just one where the sketches happen to run. I’ll keep adding to it as new questions come up, so do have a wander and see what you make of it.
