Jamer Hunt

The man who wrote the book on why your brain can't think at the scale AI operates.

Erudite, systems-minded — a designer who thinks like a philosopher. Returning; he closed 2025.

Jamer Hunt is a design theorist at Parsons School of Design at The New School, where he founded the Transdisciplinary Design program. His book Not to Scale argues that humans reason badly across orders of magnitude — we cannot feel the difference between a million and a billion — and offers "scalar framing" as a way to navigate systems too large to grasp directly.

It reads as a manifesto for unknowing. Complex systems like AI exceed our cognitive reach, and the better response is to treat that as a design problem rather than a source of dread.

He'll be framing, as he always does. He opened the 2024 summit on scale and closed 2025, and he has a way of handing a room a shape for its own thinking before anyone quite realizes they needed one.

You'll take away: a reusable mental tool. Scalar framing lets you deliberately choose the level — individual, team, organization, society — at which a problem is actually solvable, instead of arguing past each other at four different scales at once. People use this for years afterward.

ONE WATCH — Jamer Hunt's opening lecture from the Artificiality Summit 2024, on our podcast. It is the scale argument delivered live to a room much like this one. You’ll love his sharp humor and want to be there.