Essays

One in five people is neurodivergent, and among autistic adults up to four in five are out of work. Whether a room lets them do their job is the sharpest test of design I know.

The economics of brain health run to trillions and name building design as a lever, yet construction money still buys aesthetics and lowest first cost instead of cognition.

WELL and Fitwel have certified thousands of buildings and trillions in assets, and every scoring system stops at counting installed features before it ever asks whether an occupant got healthier.

A system that turns unstructured research into parametrised, verifiable recommendations, shown through a five-step pipeline and a five-layer knowledge structure built from neuroarchitecture examples.

A 1999 California study links classroom daylight to test scores, and reading past its headline number shows how many separate questions one finding has to answer before it can guide a design decision.

A data system only produces reliable dashboards once facts and interpretation are built underneath them, in that order.

Ontology and agentic AI decompose problems the same five ways; the real difference is which one lets me know where a decision came from.

Christian Huser on thirty years of writing to think rather than to produce text, and why AI's speed of retrieval changed the writing process without changing who is answerable for what gets published.

Market premiums for health-certified offices and an EU transposition deadline of 29 May 2026 push building health past its niche status as sustainability's momentum cools.

Outdoor air pollution in the EU has carried a legal principle assigning its cost to the polluter since the Single European Act of 1987, an obligation indoor air, where building owners decide and health systems absorb the consequences, has never had.

Decades of research tie a room's air, light, noise and view to health and cognition, but the findings rarely reach the floor plan decisions that set them, usually at no extra cost.

Christian Huser traces thirty years of ad hoc market analysis, from Power Balance to European market-entry advisory, to a discipline he only recently learned to call ontology.

A body of dose-response research points to a weekly threshold below which nature has no measurable effect on health, one that city planning largely ignores.

An essay on why huts and rooms with tiled floors, cold light and lost warmth break the calm of a mountain walk, read against the environmental psychology studies of Ulrich, Hartig and Koivisto that measured nature's effect on stress recovery and attention.

Detailed research documents how light, temperature, acoustics, materials and views affect people in hospitals and offices, and building design almost never draws on it.

Studies on how buildings affect health rarely reach the mayors, architects and investors who decide what gets built, and curated photography is what can make that research felt.

Running fifteen AI agents on one computer can finish days of work in minutes, at the cost of files no version history can restore and data that leaves the machine for a server nobody can see into.

A photography exhibition named Concrete Human turns decades of research on rooms and the nervous system into images, after reports alone failed to change how buildings get built.

American companies expanding into Europe carry over their home marketing system unchanged and decide to expand before they examine whether their assumptions hold there.

Career clarity starts with clarifying what words like freedom and success actually mean, not with a coaching tool, and the most reliable guide to that clarification is a person's own biography.

Neuroarchitecture research shows rooms shaping concentration, mood and behaviour through measurable physiological channels that architectural practice largely leaves untranslated.

Neuroarchitecture measures light, sound and air with growing precision, but not the state of consciousness a person carries into a room, and that gap points to a source science has yet to take seriously.

A window detail failed on the first rain, and the failure traces back to a real gap in architecture: not a lack of catalogues, but missing discoverability, liability and incentive to reuse a solution someone else already found.

On four kinds of buyers of a placebo wristband, and the exhaustion that made a hologram in silicone look like a reasonable place to put their hope.

Peter Krause built Lea, an AI influencer, for a book on AI I wrote with him. This is the interview I imagined with her, from the confident opening to the moment she is switched off.

A hybrid model swaps the question of principle for a question of configuration, and every case tends to end with more automation than it started with.

Praising AI as the ideal team member reveals what companies have quietly wanted from human employees all along.

A first-person account of selling a product that worked for years, and the difference between an effect people genuinely felt and a claim that was never true.

A friend's move from acoustics to consulting shows what a machine cannot replace when it takes over a whole production process: the tacit, hard-won craft knowledge that used to pass between people with different trained senses.

On mistaking praise for love as a child, and what that confusion still costs a father who has not unlearned it.

After thirty years inside organisations, the author searches for a job that automation cannot reach and does not find one.

An essay on twenty years of selling, consulting and trading in a business built on a placebo effect, and on refusing the ready-made roles of victim, hero and whistleblower.

A personal essay on what gets lost when the virtual secretary promised to every employee replaces the human assistant who once did that job.

A sentence about trusting AI keeps nagging at me, because trust assumes intention on the other side, and a calculating machine has none.

On the comforting claim that AI only assists human work, tested against my own years of selling something I was never sure actually worked.

For years I demonstrated a wristband that made people feel steadier, and never settled whether the effect came from the product or from the people wearing it.

A former strategic consultant on the gap between the upskilling promise and what happens to warehouse staff retrained into jobs they never asked for.

An essay on how the marketing vocabulary of hyperpersonalisation renames surveillance and profiling, and on the fact that the same customer-data infrastructure serves purposes well beyond shoe recommendations.

AI advisers who demand disclosure from others rarely disclose how their own content gets made.

A personal account of a long business rise that ended in a sudden fall, and what success never tells you about the way down.

A close reading of how AI marketing language quietly moves the human from subject to object across the same document, without ever using the word replace.

The same doubt about an AI system earns a consultant credit for judgement and an employee a diagnosis of bias, and the difference tracks position, not knowledge.

AI systems recognise emotional distress with precision and monetise it, a capability its sellers call empathy while no one outside the companies running it controls which states get turned into a target.

An account of selling silicone balance wristbands after the science showed they worked only as placebo, and of how self-deception let the selling continue.

An offhand line in an industry report traces how a 2016 alarm about political lies turned, ten years on, into an unremarked premise of AI-driven business.

A quick calculation of a trade-show wristband seller's margin left out returns, complaints and the belief that kept customers buying, the other half of the arithmetic that came only later.

A personal account of losing the ability to tell whether polished writing came from a person who thought it through or a machine that filled it in, and why that loss costs trust.

What is left of a person when status, story and name fall away, written from a turning point where I stopped looking for answers and started writing the questions down.

A personal essay on how AI's flawless recall of a customer's name and history, measured against a waiter who simply remembers, turns the feeling of being known into a mass-produced good.

A reflection on why what someone feels in a room is decided before they walk through the door, and why architecture keeps building for too simple a picture of the person who enters.

A notebook bought without a reason becomes the starting point for what AI-driven sales systems actually optimise: not customer satisfaction, but the removal of the moment a buyer might stop and think.

A personal essay arguing that the question "what am I worth if I don't perform?" fails not for lack of an answer but because it asks for the wrong currency, performance instead of contribution.

A former bracelet seller traces how expectation, experience and belief turn placebo into a durable business, from wellness gadgets to supplements and coaching.

Christian built his dream office to exact specification, found he could not work in it and traces what a noisy café taught him about a research gap architecture has not solved.

A marketing consultant traces why an identity-less AI influencer works better as a brand ambassador than a real person, and what that says about the calculation behind her.

An account of reading his own advertising copy as true-or-false claims and giving up the marketing-expert label for the plainer work of facilitation.

AI marketing developers log manipulation risk the way a team logs a software bug, rated and scheduled for a fix, while the decision not to build the feature at all stays off the list.

A roof with no purpose in a Bali forest raises the question of what a room built only for human presence, with no task to perform, would offer.

Chile never answered what I brought to it, and losing the questions turned out to matter more than any answer would have.

A first six-figure order collapses at delivery, and reinvesting rather than stopping turns out to be the sunk-cost mechanism the author now recognises everywhere.

In an AI influencer's wool jumper worn for the rain, authenticity has shifted from a state of being real to a designed appearance of one.

Working on an AI character built for research, Christian and his co-author found that knowing exactly how the illusion worked did not stop them from feeling it as real.

The AI personalisation debate keeps asking who it serves, and the honest answer is the business, every time.

An essay on building and losing Power Balance in Europe, and the watchfulness that outlasted the company, not a lesson.

A look at why writing badly three times in one week matters more to the author than any AI-polished draft, and what that says about the word "partner".

A working AI user argues that the technology's real risk is not error but its refusal to withhold an answer, which strips decisions of the friction they need.

AI produced twenty book cover designs in four minutes, technically clean, yet the process that would have made any of them mine never happened.

A former salesman traces the difference between a test and a demonstration, from a balance-band trick to software demos and financial charts.

An essay on the normalisation trick that turns a tolerated fake, the staged human influencer, into the excuse for a fully fabricated one.

Most AI books discharge the ethics question in a paragraph so the rest of the chapter can proceed undisturbed, and I failed the same test writing my own.

Before social media, I put a bracelet on famous wrists to sell it on trust rather than evidence, and the same mechanism runs the feeds today, only far faster.

Drawing on his own work drafting terms and conditions, Christian Huser argues that ethics sections in AI products function as legal cover, not as an honest reckoning with what the technology gets wrong.

Every AI strategy demands explainability, then recommends tools whose own makers cannot explain how they work.

A trade-show stand and a courtroom taught me two different standards of proof, and most of my decisions still run on the looser one.

When a model's recommendation is reliably better than a person's judgement, overriding it stops being a real choice, and the decision quietly moves from person to software.

A look at what happens when compassion becomes a switch that AI influencers can turn on and off.

AI has multiplied how fast people produce; the judgment that decides whether the output is any good still moves at the same speed it always did.

A personal account of selling a product that ran on belief rather than evidence, and what it costs to keep believing after the evidence stops arriving.

An essay on how AI-rendered diversity in online retail produces the image of representation while the jobs, pay and inclusion behind it disappear.

A failed attempt to switch music-streaming services becomes a look at how personalisation turns customer knowledge into a switching cost.

An essay on how the sentence taking shape on the page is where a thought actually forms.

At the rail of his child's ski race, the author recognises in another father the same old feeling of not being enough, passed down without a word.

A lip-synced translation video that hides the seam between original and rendering stops being localisation and becomes a deepfake by another name.

An essay arguing that values which hold only while profitable stop being values, prompted by a sales pitch built on data privacy.

Consultants and AI book authors recommend AI-generated text to others and keep writing their own bylined work by hand, which reveals what they actually think of the quality.

An account of a balance-test demonstration on a Maui beach that the author bought, then sold at trade fairs a thousand times over, without finishing the question of what the effect actually was.

Corporate change management always follows a decision rather than questioning it, so the resistance of employees who know the process gets dismissed even when it is warranted.

The author recounts using AI throughout the research and drafting of a book on AI in business, then realising the machine-assembled sentences were correct without being true, and rewriting the manuscript himself.

How selling a product he suspected worked only through belief, not fact, taught the author that daily income quietly buys off the questions that could threaten it.

A guidebook line predicting autonomous AI companies without human involvement, and why its calm, matter-of-fact tone is the part that warrants attention.

The office view he had for a decade, and the research on windows, light and noise that shows why building design changes sick leave and productivity, with nobody who plans a building accountable for it.

A hype product survives months of public scepticism unmoved, then collapses in a single night once a televised takedown flips its social meaning from a mark of commitment to a mark of gullibility.

An essay on mistaking self-optimisation for a war worth winning, and on the part of myself I only needed to let go of, not defeat.

AI case studies cluster in a narrow band of plausible success figures because failures are never written up, leaving managers to plan on a record with the risk edited out.

This essay examines how fear of missing out sells new technology and argues that the best technologies never needed fear to succeed.

An essay on why organisations with clear data and clear analysis still fail to act, arguing that the missing step is a decision that costs someone something, not another round of analysis.