Prototype Night with AIR: A Celebration of Playful AI, New Interfaces, and Human-First Tech

We teamed up with our friends at AIR (AI Residency) to throw a last-minute, anti-Tech Week gathering, packing the house at Index with a curious, generous, and imaginative crowd for an evening of community presentations.

Trudy Painter: Making software as casual as camera rolls

Trudy Painter opened the night with a playful, resonant talk on Gizmo, a platform for making and sharing tiny pieces of software as easily as you would a photo. Trudy drew a parallel between the evolution of photography — from formal, precious portraiture to spontaneous, throwaway snapshots — and the current state of software development.

In her view, AI is making it possible for software to take a similar turn: becoming casual, expressive, and even “stupid” in the best possible way. Through Gizmo, users generate mini-apps with simple voice commands, remix each other’s work, and treat code like a creative material. Her demo, featuring drawing tools, silly games, and mobile-only surprises, captured the core theme of the night: when the barriers to software creation drop, weirdness and play flourish.

Chet Ellis: In praise of craft in the age of algorithms

Chet Ellis followed with a poetic and provocative reflection on the erosion of cultural craft in an algorithm-dominated world. Through a blend of AI-generated shorts and spoken-word performance, Chet challenged the room to rethink how we measure artistic value and creative impact.

Drawing on James Baldwin’s notion that “nothing is stable under heaven,” he argued that we’re already living in the world many people fear AI will bring, where metrics trump meaning and artists are left to play catch-up. But Chet’s response is to lean into creative freedom: using generative tools not to replicate trends, but to tell personal, cinematic stories that couldn’t exist otherwise. His work, crafted on a 2019 MacBook, was a call to action for artists to reclaim the tools and re-center the human spirit in technological creativity.

Osebo Akhigbe: Building Games on Phones, Not Desktops

Next up was Osebo Akhigbe, a designer at Castle, a social game engine redefining how games are made. In a charismatic live demo (featuring a cameo by his partner Zee), Osebo built a multiplayer game on stage and showed how Castle enables anyone to create, publish, and play games straight from their phones.

With over 3 million users and a thriving creator community, Castle is pushing back against the industry norm of desktop-bound game dev tools. Osebo emphasized the value of asynchronous and synchronous multiplayer modes, and showed off games made entirely on mobile: Frogger-style runs, Fruit Ninja riffs, and gorilla tag clones.

Elie & Hugh of garden3d: Toward a human-centric AI philosophy

As co-hosts and Index’s own stewards, Elie and Hugh of garden3d took the mic to share the philosophical underpinnings of our own work, especially how we’re rethinking product design in the age of AI.

Drawing from our work at XXIX and Sanctuary Computer, we introduced the idea that the real revolution in AI interfaces is human. We questioned the flattening influence of conventional UI design — the cards, dropdowns, and feeds that reduce human experience to mechanical interaction — and proposed new design archetypes for AI: the Coach, the Curator, the Liaison. These roles represent emotionally intelligent, deeply personalized interfaces that can reflect and respond to the whole person—not just their clicks.

Rather than treating AI as a threat or cash grab, we’re asking what it means to be truly known by your computer—and how that can make our digital lives more integrated, more expansive, and more alive.

Mark Müeller (Danger Testing): Taste agents, inbox fantasies, and interconnection

Mark Müeller, one half of the experimental software duo Danger Testing, brought kinetic energy to the evening with three prototypes. First was Curate Curator, a taste-building persona that recommends art, music, and poetry based on your aesthetic inputs (and sometimes via Rick Rubin). Next was Fake VC Inbox, a tongue-in-cheek simulation of startup life success, complete with Sam Altman threads and acquisition emails. Finally, Mosaic—a multimedia vibe composer that links songs, visuals, and moods into richly interconnected digital canvases.

Barron Webster: Chess 2 (Now With Naruto, Ditto, and God)

If classic chess was overdue for an update, Barron Webster delivered it with Chess 2, a remixable AI-enhanced game where players build custom lineups featuring characters like Naruto, a venture capitalist, and the Abrahamic God. In a hilarious live match, Barron let the audience watch as AI-generated rules created unpredictable abilities (God could smite enemies or inspire pawns).

Tina Tarighian: Probing AI’s Bias With “What Does My Husband Look Like?”

To close out the night, Tina Tarighian, a creative technologist and artist at Google Creative Lab, introduced WhatDoesMyHusbandLookLike.com, a satirical tool that uses native image output to generate partners based solely on a user’s selfie.

rawing inspiration from projects like ImageNet Roulette, Tina’s piece highlighted the implicit bias in AI systems by turning the model’s assumptions into portraits—sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortably revealing. She framed the work as both a playful experience and a serious provocation: how does AI “see” us? And what does that say about the data it’s trained on?