Thinking Surface
This site is a kind of personal computing tool built in the lineage of Notion and Jupyter notebooks: a system of blocks for thinking, connecting, writing, and coding all in one. Think of it like the eccentric notebook of a designer, where each page is an expression of my curiosity—rather than my expertise.
... more soon.
My name is Frank.
I’m a designer living in San Francisco.
I help build Notion through Applied AI. My contributions have come in three chapters: AI Meeting Notes (meetings as a proxy for knowledge capture through audio), a reimagined sidebar for doing knowledge work with AI, and Software Factory—empowering teams to use Notion databases to orchestrate AI agents at scale to build software.
Before Notion, I designed a productivity tool called Superlist under the idea that simpler tools, namely a checklist, are often the most powerful. Before that, I also worked in big data for Hollywood, and most eccentrically I designed a spacesuit for storms. I started out as a sculpture major, later transitioned into garment design, and learned most of what I know about software through curiosity, and trial and error.
To me, being a designer is about studying my medium deeply, and using my learning as the raw material to stretch what we think is possible to achieve with it. I am moved by the genius of Alan Turing, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Ghery, Issey Miyake, Nils Frahm, Hania Rani, Ruth Asawa and Asimov, to name a few.
I stuttered until I was 18, and overcame it on my own. This experience shaped me deeply. Maintaining a large sense of what is possible, even when common sense says otherwise, is therefore core to who I am.
I’ve lived in Lisbon, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Berkeley.
Link to my previous site.