Zeynep Evecen
Hi, I'm Zeynep. A designer who builds, in Oslo. I'm most obsessed with how we talk to machines.
I'm a curious person at heart. One of my favorite quotes is "the future belongs to the curious." My hope is that this site grows alongside me — a small public record of what I keep returning to.
- Design engineering
I design and build stuff.
- Front-end
Where I started. Still the bone underneath.
- Design
Self-taught. Still teaching myself.
- Leading
Hiring designers, mentoring them, trying to be useful.
- Writing
Essays and notes here. Journals everywhere. Some wholesome sci-fi I haven't published yet.
- Music
On all day. Lately DJ sets — JIRA on repeat.
- Stories
Star Trek is the anchor. Ted Lasso, Stick, and The Office on a loop around it.
- Books
Sci-fi forever. Non-fiction I keep buying and almost reading.
- Travel
Two years on the road, a winter in Asia. Oslo now.
- Bonds
Old friendships. The same builder-buddies for years.
- Honesty
Non-negotiable. If you can't, I can't.
- Hope
Optimistic, not naive. Humans figure it out, eventually.
- Fun
Won't trade it. Especially at work.
- Kindness
Kind, not polite.
- Romance
I get attached. To people, to places, to songs that mean something.
- Holodecks
The actual lifetime goal.
- Curiosity
Curiosity is only bad if you're a cat.
- Beyond-text AI
Voice, presence, back-and-forth. The next interface isn't a chat box.
- Wholesome sci-fi
Writing the futures I want to live in.
- Space
Tegmark, quantum, the math under everything I can't quite see yet.
The thing I'm most obsessed with right now is how we talk to machines. We're still in the command line era of AI — almost everything happens through a chat box, and that's not how humans actually want to interact with another presence. The real interface is voice, back-and-forth, knowing when not to say something. I'd like to spend my life building toward something like a holodeck.
I studied computer engineering, worked as a front-end developer, eventually taught myself design, and now I'm the Head of Product Design at Saga, a legal AI company, where I was the first hire. I took the product from zero to one, owned the frontend codebase, and ran user interviews. Today I hire and mentor designers while still shipping code. Before Saga, I designed and built LLM Sandbox at CONCIDE, an early way for Norwegian law organizations to use GPT-4.
Earlier still, the moment I got to university, I started a company called Brieferr with all of my savings from my allowance. Brieferr failed. But that year was the most instructive of my life. It's how I found my first job as a front-end engineer, and more importantly, it's how I made lifelong friends. One of them is now my partner, and we've been building things together ever since.
I spent two years as a digital nomad — a winter in Asia, a lot of slow travel, a lot of remote work, a lot of interesting people. Now I've settled in Oslo.
I've played piano since I was a kid. Neither of my parents play, but my mom is a music enthusiast, so the house was always full of instruments. It's still my favorite way to be quiet.
I write — essays and notes here, journals everywhere, and lately some wholesome sci-fi I haven't published yet. The wholesome part matters. I want to write the kind of futures I'd want to live in.