Visible intent
Show what the system plans to do before consequential work begins.
Code:Emotion Design
We design AI that organizations can trust, inspect, and stand behind.
Interfaces, governance gates, and decision points that keep a human in control of the system.
For thirty years, Code:Emotion has built identity, interface, and editorial systems where design had to do more than decorate. Today the hardest version of that problem is AI: software that recommends, drafts, and acts, often without a clear way for people to see, check, stop, or reverse it.
Human control, made visible
AI product UX
Governance interfaces
Decision systems
What we design
The human-in-the-middle layer of AI products
Most AI products emphasize what the model can do. We design what the people around it need in order to understand, approve, correct, and remain accountable for the result.
Human decision gates
Place approval, modification, escalation, and refusal at the moments that matter.
Inspectable outcomes
Preserve the reasoning, actions, ownership, and reversal path behind each result.
HITM in action
Three case studies in judgment-preserving interface design
These studies show the method in application. Fully working prototypes are the next stage; the current work should be read as design evidence, not as a claim of validated operational outcomes.
01
Transparent automation
GLASSBOX
An automation interface built around visible intent, live execution, consequence gates, audit, and undo instead of opaque agent magic.
Full studyPrototype forthcoming
02
Crisis-state interaction
Panic Defense
A low-cognition mobile flow designed around human choice, motor imprecision, minimal reading, and a clean exit rather than an engagement loop.
Full studyPrototype forthcoming
03
Human-owned completion
DONE
A case study in making completion, review, ownership, and the final human decision legible inside an AI-supported workflow.
Case studyPrototype forthcoming
One system, two perspectives
Design is HITM's implementation advantage
Human in the Middle defines what should remain human-owned and where judgment belongs. Code:Emotion turns those principles into the actual product experience: screens, states, controls, explanations, and handoffs.
The practices remain sibling brands under schmidtpabst.com. They cross-promote because governance without usable interfaces stays theoretical, while interface design without governance can make unsafe automation look deceptively simple.
Explore Human in the MiddleHITM contributes
Boundaries and authority
Ownership, approval, escalation, evidence, and the credible option not to automate.
Code:Emotion contributes
Experience and implementation
Interaction models that make those boundaries visible, understandable, and usable.
Established studio
Thirty years of design craft, pointed at the hardest problem in software.
The studio still works across identity, interface, editorial systems, and unusual hybrid briefs. The commercial focus is now where that experience is most scarce: AI products that organizations need to trust, inspect, and stand behind.