Takafumi Horiuchi (Design Engineer)
We design what AI designs.
Self-Initiated Work
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Personal Fit UI - Personalising Interfaces Through Constraint-Driven Design (August 2026)
Generating interfaces tailored to cognitive, sensory, and physical characteristics within the boundaries of scientific evidence and design constraints. A car-navigation prototype was used to examine both the potential and the limitations of the approach.
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My Own Pokémon Generation (July 2026)
A new Pokémon species is generated from the player's words during play, then brought into the game as an encounter they can catch. What I designed is not what the AI makes, but what it is not allowed to break.
Earlier Academic Work
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Master's Thesis on Human–Robot Interaction Design (July 2021)
The operator's field of view becomes a condition that determines where a robot may move. This research proposed and implemented a safety mechanism that incorporates human attention into collision prevention without requiring objects to be registered in advance.
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Bachelor's Thesis on Constraint Programming (June 2019)
The simulator identifies conditions that can never become true again and removes them from the search. By reducing the possibilities it must consider without changing the result, the method roughly halved execution time in the evaluation model.
How I Think About Design
AI can generate a wide range of content within the conditions it is given. What decides what is possible in the first place, though, is the design space it was handed. Objectives, values, priorities, constraints, prohibitions, the criteria a result is judged by — these set the boundary, and AI searches inside it. What we design is that space rather than any one output; I call this approach “constraint-driven design”. A constraint is there to keep possibilities open rather than to close them off, and which form finally goes out into the world is still our decision — one that takes craft, and an eye for the form it should take. We design the space, and then we choose one form from inside it and commit to it. Taking on both is what I understand the designer’s work to be now that AI can generate.