Theory
I work on problems that belong to no single field. Transversal Design is my name for how I do it, and gliding is how I do it with AI.
In 1998, a year after finishing my PhD at Harvard, where I studied how attention shapes what we see, I was also making generative light pieces for music with software I had written. Putting the two together produced a method for animations that seem to keep time with whatever music is playing. It became US patent 6,163,323 in 2000.
It needed both: research on how people see motion and pattern, and a working body of images and music to try it on. The invention sat in the ground between them, which is where I have found most of the ideas worth building since.
Real problems live across many dimensions at once: the people involved, the institution around them, the materials, the money, the rules, the history, and how everyone feels about it. Most methods pick one of those and work inside it. Transversal Design maps the dimensions a problem really has, moves across them on purpose (I call this gliding), and looks hard at what shows up between them. The output is something you can build: a mechanism, a program, or a system.
The word comes from transversal theory, which I worked on with the playwright and theorist Bryan Reynolds from 1998, publishing under our joint name, zooz. Bryan also founded the Transversal Theater Company, and I made the visuals for two of its productions, Curie Curie and The Passage. Transversal Design is the design method I built on that thinking, through years of teaching, consulting, and building.
Where the methods sit
In 2023 I wrote in The Conversation that the best way to work with a language model is to glide, not search: steer a long conversation across a problem, instead of firing single questions at it. Models are very good at range. What it says should be treated, as I put it then, as "imaginative conjectures that require further verification, analysis and filtering by you, the human pilot."
The same division of labor runs through every Custom Glider I build. The system does the reading at scale. People decide where to land.
Named methods
Persona Multiplication
Developed with David Pearl. Human-centered design usually works from a handful of typical users, and the people it leaves out can end up harmed by the result, which we called designed injustice. Persona Multiplication adds a step just after the usual personas are written: multiply them across a much wider range of people and uses, and evaluate the design against each. Published in 2023 as "Persona Multiplication: A Method to Avoid Designed Injustice."
Multidimensional Task Analysis
Human factors has long analyzed tasks by what people do physically and mentally. Multidimensional Task Analysis adds analyses that usually go undone, of emotion, information, decisions, attention, and teamwork, because each one finds design constraints and opportunities the others miss. The 2022 paper works through Emotional Task Analysis in depth.
CLIMBER
The design process I teach: Customer, Life, Insight, Mechanism, Build, Evaluate, Refine. It moves a team from a vague goal to a mechanism someone can build and test. Not yet published.
In a long session with a language model, how much of the insight comes from the person and how much from the model? I am studying hundreds of my own sessions to find out.
Why do language models seem able to recover more structure than anyone put into them, and what should that change about how we use them?
What does human factors engineering look like when the thing being designed is a whole working relationship between people and AI systems?
Selected writing
More than fifty papers across perception, neuroscience, human factors, consumer psychology, and space physics. A selection:
2025
Pearl, D., Murphy, J., and Intriligator, J. "Polymorphic Combinatorial Frameworks (PCF): Guiding the Design of Mathematically-Grounded, Adaptive AI Agents." arXiv 2508.01581. Read it
2023
Intriligator, J. "Gliding, not searching: Here's how to reset your view of ChatGPT to steer it to better results." The Conversation, July 21st, 2023. Read it
2023
Pearl, D., and Intriligator, J. "Persona Multiplication: A Method to Avoid Designed Injustice." International Journal of Design in Society 17(1), 31-44. doi:10.18848/2325-1328/CGP/v17i01/31-44
2022
Intriligator, J. "Multidimensional Task Analysis (MTA): A New Design Method for Human Factors Practitioners." Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 66(1), 2229-2233. doi:10.1177/1071181322661534
2010
zooz (Intriligator, J., and Reynolds, B.). "Continuous R(E)volutions: Thermodynamic Processes, Analog Hybridizations, Transversal Becomings, and the Post-human." postmedieval 1(1/2).
2003
zooz (Intriligator, J., and Reynolds, B.). "Transversal Poetics: I.E. Mode." GESTOS 18(35), 9-22.
2001
Intriligator, J., and Cavanagh, P. "The spatial resolution of visual attention." Cognitive Psychology, 171-216.
2001
Battelli, L., Cavanagh, P., Intriligator, J., Tramo, M. J., Hénaff, M. A., and Michel, F. "Unilateral right parietal damage leads to bilateral deficit for high-level motion." Neuron 32, 985-995.
1998
Cavanagh, P., Hénaff, M. A., Michel, F., Landis, T., Troscianko, T., and Intriligator, J. "Complete sparing of high-contrast colour input to motion perception in cortical colour blindness." Nature Neuroscience 1(3), 242-247.
1996
He, S., Cavanagh, P., and Intriligator, J. "Attentional resolution and the locus of visual awareness." Nature 383, 334-337.
1992
Kosslyn, S. M., and Intriligator, J. "Is cognitive neuropsychology plausible? The perils of sitting on a one-legged stool." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 4(1), 96-106.