Changing Shapes

How AI, logistics, and thoughtful design are reshaping the humanity of care

This week’s Wish I Thought of That digs into a part of healthcare most people never see: the admin. Clinicians today spend 30–50% of their time documenting, coding, chasing insurance forms or navigating clunky digital systems — a staggering shift that’s reshaping both patient care and contributing to clinician burnout. In this episode, we explore why this burden has grown, what it means for the human experience of medicine, and how a new generation of tools is quietly changing the story.

We break down three emerging layers of “clerk-class” health tech: AI scribes like Voize that turn speech into structured documentation, practice OS platforms like Nelly that streamline onboarding and paperwork, and Uber-like logistics tools that coordinate in-home care more efficiently. Together, these products aren’t replacing clinicians — they’re giving them time back. And they raise a bigger question: what happens to clinical judgment, empathy and connection when the system finally reduces its drag?

Along the way, Tom and Hiba examine the design principles behind tools that actually make healthcare more human, not less. From “don’t make me think” UX to contextual workflows, they explore why empathy has to be engineered into the invisible moments of care, not sprinkled on top. They also look at how structured admin data fuels early-detection tools like C the Signs, which has already helped detect over 65,000 cancer cases by spotting patterns in the data.

This episode asks a simple but consequential question:
If we redesign the admin layer of healthcare, do we unlock better medicine — or risk turning care into an industrial process?

If you work in health, design, or tech, or you’ve ever felt processed instead of cared for in a clinic, this one will resonate.

Key themes

• The 30–50% admin burden and how it reshapes care

• The rise of AI scribes, practice OS tools and care-logistics platforms

• Designing tools that reduce cognitive load, not empathy

• “AI as the clerk-class”: freeing humans for human work

• Why context matters more than features in clinical UX

• Structured admin → early detection → life-saving outcomes

• Making healthcare more human through better systems, not shinier apps

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/
The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It’s for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba reads features, stories, and signals in one go — from product to org culture — so you can ship with craft, protect user trust, and keep real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/
Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

How trust, empathy and lived experience shape better digital tools

This week’s Wish I Thought of That opens a mini-series on health and wellbeing by asking a blunt question: why do so many health apps feel clever, but not caring? We dig into the messy, human side of health-tech design — from journaling tools to nutrition platforms to long-term coaching systems — and what it takes to build products people trust with their bodies and inner lives.

We explore why trust must be earned before someone even downloads an app, and why that trust is lost instantly through clumsy UX, overblown promises or gimmicky “delight.” Tom breaks down the principles behind products like Five Minute Journal, RNT Fitness and The Doctor’s Kitchen: clarity over cleverness, empowerment over dependency, and features that feel like an attentive friend rather than a dopamine trap.

Along the way, they tackle the myth that AI can replace mid-level product thinking. Lived experience, emotional nuance and narrative discipline are the invisible backbone of any tool meant to support real change. And we argue that the real magic happens when everyone on the team, from backend engineers to designers, can feel the user’s stakes.

This episode asks what happens when we treat digital health not as engagement optimisation, but as long-term companionship. Can a product support someone through difficult change without pretending to replace a human? And how do you design tools that fit the complexity of real lives, not just tidy user journeys?

If you want a nudge to rethink how your team builds trust, care and context into products, this one is worth your time.

Key themes

• Building trust before the first tap and how quickly it can be lost.

• Clarity over cleverness: why “delight” is never enough in health tech.

• Designing empowerment instead of dependency loops.

• Human nuance as the irreplaceable layer AI can’t simulate.

• Health tech as long-term support, not engagement farming.

• Why lived experience matters more than generic AI-generated specs.

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/
The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It’s for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba reads features, stories, and signals in one go — from product to org culture — so you can ship with craft, protect user trust, and keep real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/
Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

How emotional intelligence in design might help rebuild human connection

In this week’s Wish I Thought of That, we explore Village, a quietly ambitious app using AI to help small circles of people stay connected. After years of isolation and algorithmic noise, we’ve lost some skills on how to stay connected IRL. Village asks whether technology can help us remember.

We look at what happens when AI moves from productivity to empathy, not just helping us work faster, but nudging us to care. Can a machine remind us to call a friend without replacing the human impulse to notice? When does a tool become a teacher, and when does it cross into emotional outsourcing?

From training wheels vs balance bikes to measuring connection in real-world touchpoints, Tom and Hiba unpack the fine line between AI-assisted empathy and AI as empathy proxy. Along the way, they break down three layers of emotionally intelligent design — reactive, proactive, and contextual — from therapy bots to mindset-aware tools like Duolingo and Five Minute Journal, to context-sensitive apps like Headspace, N26, and Apple Photos.

This episode asks a simple question with cultural weight: can technology help us feel more human — or just simulate the feeling of it?

Key themes

• Relearning connection in a post-pandemic, AI-mediated world.

• Human connection as infrastructure — can it exist without AI?

• Training wheels vs balance bike: when should AI “leave the room”?

• Measuring success through offline outcomes, not engagement time.

• Emotional intelligence in apps: reactive, proactive, contextual.

• The cultural vacuum and why emotional resonance is the next UX frontier.

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/
The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It’s for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba reads features, stories, and signals in one go — from product to org culture — so you can ship with craft, protect user trust, and keep real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/
Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

How AI-first browsers are reshaping information literacy, trust, and product design.

In this week’s WITOT, we ask what happens when the browser starts “driving.” With OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, AI agents can remember your sessions, act across tabs, and deliver confident answers… fast. But speed isn’t the same as sense. If we outsource the route-finding, we risk losing the mental map that helps us judge sources, bias, and authority.

We draw a line between two kinds of truth: settled facts (where a single answer is useful) and perspective questions (where you need a platter of viewpoints). Today’s agentic browsing often collapses both into one “final” output. Great for convenience, risky for judgment. We also dig into permission creep and incentives: when an agent has to see everything to be useful and will be able to do the driving, who is the customer and who becomes the product?

It’s not all doom. We sketch a more human pattern: provenance on by default, an off-switch for automation, and design that surfaces primary sources before conclusions. Plus a hopeful twist: “geocaching for AI.” How can using agents widen discovery and spotlight the long tail rather than narrow it.

This is a conversation about values in product craft: keeping the speed and keeping our information sense.

Key themes

• Speed vs sense: convenience taxes information literacy.

• Fact Mode vs Perspective Mode: different questions need different UX.

• Agent “babysitting,” provenance by default, and the off-switch.

• Permissions & power: customer or product: who benefits from your data?

• Brand as primary source: why credibility will matter more in an AI-mediated web.

• “Geocaching for AI”: designing for serendipity and the long tail.

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/
The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It’s for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba reads features, stories, and signals in one go — from product to org culture — so you can ship with craft, protect user trust, and keep real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/
Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes blends craft, culture and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

How children’s toys are teaching us better product design.

In this week’s episode of Wish I Thought of That (WITOT), Hiba Ganta and I look at what innovation really means in the space of children’s play — and what it reveals about how we design technology for adults.

The conversation starts with a simple idea: healthy play in the age of addictive screens. From Bluey to Yoto and Lovevery, we explore products that respect attention rather than exploit it, and how those same design principles could reshape digital products everywhere.

We talk about how tools for kids often get the basics right, clear beginnings and endings, calm pacing, tactile control, while adult tools chase engagement at any cost. The question running through the episode: what would happen if software was designed like a good toy?

It’s a conversation about values in design: autonomy, clarity, and care. And about the responsibility of builders to create tools that nurture independence, not dependence.

• Design for independence, not dependence: the line between empowering and exploiting users.

• Parent OS: how great children’s products quietly serve both the parent (operator) and child (beneficiary).

• Offline innovation: why the best tech sometimes steps out of the screen.

• From play to product: how Montessori thinking and real-world tactility inspire better UX.

• Cultural shift: the growing movement toward phone-light childhoods and intentional tech use.

Links

Hiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/

The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It is for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic, experience-grounded strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba has led product, designs hands-on, and works on engagement and internal culture, so she reads features, stories, and signals in one go. Subscribe if you care about shipping with craft, protecting user trust, and keeping real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/

Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes focuses on products that blend craft, culture, and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.

🧠 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

When a UX experiment became the world’s default way to talk to AI

In this first episode of our new weekly segment Wish I Thought of That (WITOT), Hiba Ganta and I explore how chat became the interface for everything, and whether it should stay that way.

We talk about why ChatGPT’s text box was never meant to be the final form of AI interaction, and how a design experiment scaled into a global pattern that’s shaping everything from education tools to enterprise workflows.

From there, the conversation moves into how voice, visuals, and chat each change the way we think, and what that means for people building products today.

This episode is a reflection on product sense, human expectations, and the danger of forgetting what makes good design intuitive. It’s also about trust: the trust we place in interfaces, in data, and in ourselves when we work through new tools that can both empower and mislead.

The interface we choose doesn’t just change what we do, it changes how we think.

KEY THEMES

• Chat as accident that scaled: how an early UX choice defined a generation of AI tools.

• Voice vs. visuals: how each mode of interaction triggers a different kind of thinking.

• Fact-checking the machine: designing for trust, not just output.

• Product sense for everyone: why taste and intent matter more than ever.

• Building with intent: avoiding homogenisation by grounding in human habits and values.

LINKS

Hiba on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/

The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It is for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic, experience-grounded strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba has led product, designs hands-on, and works on engagement and internal culture, so she reads features, stories, and signals in one go. Subscribe if you care about shipping with craft, protecting user trust, and keeping real judgment in the loop.

Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-horak/

Tom is the founder of All Shapes, a design and product studio working with founders, scale-ups and innovative enterprises to build meaningful digital tools that last. All Shapes focuses on products that blend craft, culture, and human clarity — helping teams move from early concepts to high-performing, values-aligned experiences.

Tom also hosts Changing Shapes, a podcast about how technology changes the way we design, create, and connect and how to build tools that stay human as they scale.

🧠 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.

🔗 Past episodes and articles available at tomhorak.substack.com.

A conversation about leading with care in competitive spaces, building AI hackathons that mix speed with friction, and how communicators can balance hype, trust, and authenticity in the age of AI.

Changing Shapes – Episode 7

I sat down with Tim Weinheimer, Chief Marketing Officer at Hahn, to explore how he’s navigated decades of agency change — from the early digital days to today’s AI-powered campaigns — while holding fast to a simple but powerful value: caring.

Tim has led award-winning public health initiatives, built cross-disciplinary teams to experiment with AI, and authored The Robot Apocalypse: How Brands Can Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI back in 2018, well before the current hype wave. His outlook combines data, ethics, and storytelling in a way that feels both pragmatic and deeply human.

Our conversation explores:

• How to bring success and care together in leadership, and why small acts of connection matter in a distributed workforce.

• What Hahn’s AI hackathons revealed about using generative tools for creativity without losing friction or emotional resonance.

• Where we are in both the AI hype cycle and the trust cycle, and how brands should navigate each.

• Why personalization and “extreme listening” may shape the next wave of technology and social platforms.

• The cultural fatigue with social media and what might emerge to replace it.

It’s a conversation about speed and care, hype and trust, innovation and authenticity — and how to build communication that remains both cutting-edge and human.

Tim Weinheimer on Linkedin

https://hahn.agency/

A conversation about simulated worlds, agents that find clever exploits, and building call-centre AI that’s faster, kinder, and still human-centred.

Changing Shapes – Episode 6

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Platonov, a UX engineer and former technical artist who spent eight and a half years at DeepMind, to unpack how simulated worlds train real capabilities, why agents find exploits humans miss, and what “values in product” actually looks like when you’re shipping. Today he’s building an AI-driven call-centre platform at a stealth startup.

Our conversation explores:

• A self-taught path from architecture and graphic design into front-end engineering, then DeepMind, then technical art building 3D worlds for agents.

• What front-end and simulation tooling enable in research: experiment dashboards, organisational visibility, and environments that both agents and humans can interpret.

• Agents in simulated worlds: reward design, emergent “bug-finding”, and why sim speed and scale matter before taking skills to robots.

• Sim-to-real and the near-term horizon for embodied AI, plus a candid take on uncertainty, timelines, and what to teach our kids now.

• Craft and culture in an AI era: why offline making, woodcarving, and tangible artefacts feel more valuable amid ubiquitous generative media.

• The new venture: standing up AI call-centre agents with prompts, instant iteration, human hand-off, and why agility beats static scripts.

• Values in practice: reducing user frustration, creating small moments of joy, and choosing work with real impact over “pretty for pretty’s sake.”

• Breaking into AI now: bring curiosity, learn the basics, use LLMs as leverage, and understand what they produce so you can correct and direct.

It’s a conversation about building worlds for machines and meaning for people — speed and safety, tools and taste, and where human touch still sets the standard.

Alex on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/platonovs

🧠 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.
🔗 Past episodes and articles at tomhorak.substack.com

A conversation about AI tools, cultural shifts, and why products still need a human touch to feel alive.

Changing Shapes – Episode 5
“Finding meaning in the mess of product design.”

In this episode of Changing Shapes, I sit down with Hiba Ganta, a Berlin-based product builder and writer whose career spans startups, community, no-code, and design, to talk about what it means to work fast, embrace chaos, and still create products with soul.

Hiba shares how a startup incubator in Montreal set her on a path of “professional mess cleaning,” why she’s drawn to intense environments, and how experimenting with AI prototyping tools like Lovable and Replit changed the way she builds.

Our conversation explores:

• Why friction is essential to good work, even in an age obsessed with efficiency

• What AI can accelerate, and where only human creativity adds the magic

• How the definition of MVP is shifting when anyone can “vibe code” a prototype

• Why craftsmanship and intentionality will always have a market, online or off

• How unexpected people becoming “designers” could refresh the whole field

It’s a conversation about chaos and systems, speed and standards, and the cultural value of products that still carry a human touch.

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Hiba’s brilliant Substack is The Needful 👇 The number one takeaway from this podcast should be you go subscribe to that.

The Needful is Hiba’s newsletter on cultural intelligence for sharper, human-led product decisions. It is for indie founders and small teams who want clarity without the AI hype. Expect pragmatic, experience-grounded strategy, mental models, and cultural research that lift your team’s thinking. Hiba has led product, designs hands-on, and works on engagement and internal culture, so she reads features, stories, and signals in one go. Subscribe if you care about shipping with craft, protecting user trust, and keeping real judgment in the loop.

Highlights:

• Weird Advantage 01: Protecting Originality — aliveness, tension branding, mental models.

• The Accidental Interface We All Copied — a demo UI set AI defaults; redesign for exploration.

• One Sprint in the Vibe-Coding Trenches — build one thin slice yourself to set standards.

Hiba on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hibaganta/

🧠 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.
🔗 Past episodes and articles available at tomhorak.substack.com.

How a jazz drummer turned SaaS founder leads with trust, creativity—and a healthy dose of humility.

Changing Shapes – Episode 4
“Wonder. What if. Let’s try.”

In this episode of Changing Shapes, I speak with Evan Yudell—founder and CEO of Sales Made Simple—about what it takes to build trust in teams, navigate failure, and lead creatively in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

Evan left a corporate leadership career to bootstrap his own SaaS company, not because he always wanted to be a founder, but because someone asked him a question at the right time—and he had the vision (and humility) to say yes.

Our conversation explores:

• Why real trust takes time, humility, and inclusion

• The creative side of leadership (and why jazz drumming might be the best training for it)

• What AI can and can’t replace when it comes to human connection

• The danger of skipping hard lessons when juniors are replaced by language models

• What advice Evan gives to the next generation of leaders in a post-AI world

We also talk about how his own neurodivergence shaped his leadership style, why he avoids "us vs them" hierarchies, and how he builds loyalty by letting people into the process—because, as Evan puts it, “asking for someone’s opinion is one of the clearest signals that you trust them.”

This one’s full of hard-won wisdom, punchy honesty, and plenty of unexpected moments.

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🧠 Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of culture, values, and technology.
🔗 Past episodes and articles available at tomhorak.substack.com.