Archetype AI
Leonardo Giusti
Biography
Leonardo Giusti is a designer and researcher exploring how intelligence becomes part of the physical world. His work brings emerging technologies into everyday life, shaping how people interact with objects, environments, and AI.
He is co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Archetype AI. Over the past 20 years, he has worked across research and product design, previously serving as Head of Design at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, UX Design and Product Lead at Samsung Design and R&D, and Interaction Design Lead at MIT Design Lab.
Leonardo holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the University of Florence and was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. He has filed more than 40 patents and published more than 40 scientific papers. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Fast Company.
Gallery
Google, Archetype AI
About the talk
Living Objects: Designing Products That Grow With Us
For a century, products have shipped as fixed artifacts, with change deferred to the next release. Physical AI offers a different path: living objects whose behavior continues to unfold over time, shaped by interaction with people and the particular places they inhabit.
Leonardo Giusti explores this idea through a series of projects that bring AI into the physical world. Developed at Google, Soli and Jacquard investigated how intelligence might be woven into everyday things, making them responsive to the people around them. Three probes from Archetype AI and the MIT Design Intelligence Lab take the idea further: a lamp with memory, a radio that gives voice to the conditions around it, and a set of tags that connect everyday objects. Each is designed to remain open-ended, growing, changing, and adapting through use.
Together, these projects approach AI as a design material with its own grain, tolerances, and tendencies. They pose a question for designers: what should be decided in advance, and what should be left for life to shape?