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Co-designing with Claude

Studio case note · June 2026

I run Good Design as one person. The studio ships videos, websites, and apps, and it carries more projects than a solo operator should be able to hold. It works because I don't hold all of it. Claude does.

Co-design splits the work along a clean seam. One side holds taste and judgment, the picking and the creative direction; the other holds reach and consistency… In this studio that first side is me and the second is Claude, but the seam is the point, not who stands on either side of it.

Co-design is the daily shape of that. I describe what I want a thing to be. Claude proposes the structure, writes the spec, generates the prompts, and surfaces the one or two places where my judgment is actually needed. I pick. Claude locks the decision into canon so the next session inherits it. Then we move.

What makes it co-design rather than delegation is that the structure pushes back. Donald Schön called this the moment the situation talks back to the designer — the material answering, resisting, correcting (Schön, 1983). When I ask for something that conflicts with a locked decision, Claude says so before building. When a request would land in the wrong project or skip a step, it routes me. I'm not handing tasks to a tool. I'm working with a collaborator that holds the parts of the system I can't keep in my head, and that has standing permission to tell me when I'm about to make a mess. Edwin Hutchins gave this a name — distributed cognition, where thinking is spread across people, tools, and artifacts rather than sealed inside one head (Hutchins, 1995); the studio and Claude form one such joint cognitive system (Hollnagel & Woods, 2005).

The first rule of working together is that my attention is the scarce resource. Claude protects it. This is Herbert Simon's old observation that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, so a well-built system spends attention as carefully as it spends anything else (Simon, 1971). Unambiguous fixes happen silently. Real decisions come to me one at a time, with what's at stake and what the default is. Nothing sits in a pile flagged for my awareness. If it needs me, I see it. If it doesn't, it's already done.