Diana Simpson-Hernandez has spent fifteen years designing products, services and ventures, and teaching other people to do the same. She is the author of Design Poiesis, a design method for the age of AI, the founder of Aletheai, a lecturer at IED Madrid and a mentor at London College of Communication (UAL).
Design Poiesis is a design methodology for the age of AI: five moves, two rails and a gate that turn informed intuition into design claims you can trace and test. It is written for designers, and for anyone doing structured creative work with AI.
AI generates ideas faster than anyone can remember where they came from. Without a trail you can’t tell your own insight from the model’s suggestion, or a tested claim from a plausible one. Design Poiesis makes the trail the pass condition of every move.
The ground: exploration, observation, experience, reading, data
The most powerful AI yet just moved part of how it thinks into a form no human can read. That makes the case, urgently, for the other kind of AI: the kind that keeps a ledger you can open.
Why the smartest AI in the world still can't be trusted, and the patch that doesn't work.
1.2 million transactions a year. One in three collapse. We measure everything except the people.
Behavioural decision intelligence that states its evidence and its limits. Six patent applications filed.
The company and the patents →PublishedDesign Poiesis, LEVER, RECALL, FLYWHEEL, Vibecoding and more, written down in full so anyone can check the reasoning.
The methods →LecturerIED Madrid, LCC (UAL), Nottingham Trent; talks at the British Library and the European Commission.
Teaching and talks →2012 – 2017SPARK, Glass Lab, Monogram Publishers, exhibitions and press.
Earlier work →Diana Simpson-Hernandez is a designer, educator, innovator and founder. Her work sits where design, behaviour and AI meet: how ideas get made, how decisions get defended, and how people who were never taught to build can build.
She trained in product design at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, where her MA dissertation, Modern Mythopoeia (2012), argued that the stories a culture tells itself decide which futures get built, and that designers can work on those stories on purpose. The speculative practice turned practical. Glass Lab made surface products from the commercial glass waste of London businesses, and at Shake Your Power, which she co-founded, she co-designed SPARK, the first energy-generating musical instrument, which was granted a US patent, won two London Design Award Golds and was piloted in schools in the UK, the US and India.
She then spent a decade in product and service design and in teaching. She was Senior Lecturer in Product Design at Nottingham Trent University, and later led the digital design team and product strategy at Slimming World, one of the UK's largest behaviour-change platforms, where the work was keeping more than 250,000 members engaged with a health service week after week.
In December 2024 she founded Aletheai to build the decision layer she kept finding missing: an engine that ranks who deserves attention by the evidence, explains each ranking in plain English, and declines to rank where the evidence runs out. She has filed six patent applications, on the engine and on the governance of AI agents' actions, and ran a feasibility study with the STFC Hartree Centre on real human-behaviour data.
Her own design method, Design Poiesis (2026), brings those threads together. Five moves, two rails and a gate turn informed intuition into design claims that can be traced and tested, with one discipline running through all of it: every insight carries its trail. It formalises how she has worked for fifteen years, and the plan to test it, in her own practice and with students, is published with it.
She teaches AI-native product building to MA students at IED Madrid every year, mentors founders at London College of Communication (UAL), and publishes her methods in the open. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and works in English and Spanish.