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.
Summit 2026
Friday ·
8:00pm – 8:45pm
Fireside duo
The Couch (main auditorium)
A designer, a writer and two researchers on what it takes to stay in the question when everything around you is optimized for answers.
Saturday ·
7:45pm – 8:30pm
Panel
The Couch (main auditorium)
Jamer Hunt’s challenge from last year’s Summit, taken seriously, landed.
Summit 2025
Saturday ·
7:30pm
Scaling shapes the world we share, spreading patterns of thought, design, and culture across systems and societies. Jamer Hunt and Adam Cutler join Helen and Dave to explore how scaling can become an act of imagination: what values, practices, and forms of care we choose to amplify, and how human-synthetic creativity might point toward new kinds of growth worth multiplying.
Watch the session
Summit 2024
Saturday ·
7:30pm
Jamer Hunt, author of Not to Scale and inspired by the Eames’s film Powers of Ten, catalyzes our opening discussion on the concept of scale. This session delves into how different scales — individual, organizational, community, societal, even temporal — shape our perspectives and influence the design of AI systems. By examining the impact of scale on context and constraints, Jamer guides us to a clearer understanding of the appropriate levels at which we can envision and build a hopeful future with AI.
Watch the session