Designing and building creative intelligence products and brands for humans
We build human-first products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side. Interfaces that are conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and AI technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt.
For over 20 years, we've solving problems alongside teams at Google, IBM, Air New Zealand, Kpler, EE, News UK, Tesco, and The Economist, sitting in the space between product strategy and hands-on engineering, designing systems and shipping products that make the complex feel simple.
Emmly
Creative workflow product for briefs, references, and generative tools. We use it on our own work; Seedance through Gemini sit in the same pipeline.
Emmly
Workflow management for creative teams sitting on existing inspiration and work, wired into generative AI tools from Seedance to Gemini.
Emmly
Mass
My mum thinks it's cool. My friends think it's as odd as a cat with wings. Getting human opinion is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and we're not sure we can trust the result. That's why we built Mass, a platform to deploy hundreds of synthetic human personas that think, reason, and respond like the target audience. They're brutally honest and unfiltered, giving a real sense of what audiences want in minutes, not months. And at a fraction of the cost. Understand perspectives, validate messaging, explore positioning, and more before committing to the real human research.
Mass
Desktop client for the same synthetic runs, backed by local LLM models so research stays on the machine.
Offpointe.studios
Brand, website, digital printing automation and e-commerce.
On the River
Maps for rivers and canals we use ourselves. Public waterways across Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium: locks, clubs, channel guides, and route planning.
Beryl
E-commerce website for Beryl, a London-based bike light and transport company. Today, they support over 300,000 people using their bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters and cargo bikes to get to work, to university, and to explore.
Appo
Prototype build to help businesses automate customer support and sales for dental practices using AI and chatbots, with HIPAA-compliant data collection, storage, and insights.
Appo
FaultFixers
Identity for FaultFixers, a facilities maintenance company.
FaultFixers
Insight and strategy
Decoding the behaviours and tensions shaping how people use AI products, tools, and brands. Then a clear recommendation: positioning, product direction, or the next thing to ship.
On the technical side that usually means framing the commercial case for an AI surface before the build, mapping what can stay local versus what needs the cloud, and stress-testing ideas against grounded feedback so the team ships the right thing, not another demo.
Product design and engineering
Designing the interface and writing the code that makes it happen. This is the core of our fractional consultancy work, and what we do every day.
Web products in Vue, Nuxt, and TypeScript, with GraphQL or REST APIs, PostgreSQL, and Redis where the product needs it. Data-heavy front ends for analysts and operators: interactive tables, timelines, charts, and schema-driven generative UI that turns structured data into screens people can act on. Cloud and delivery on AWS or GCP with Terraform, CI/CD, and the reliability work (latency, observability, security) so the product survives the week after launch. Desktop and local-first when the job needs it: Electron, Rust layers, SQLite, on-device search and enrichment, with cloud only for the heavy jobs.
Thinking machines
How people talk to it, how it reasons, how it fails, and how it stays in production. Not just designing the interface, but engineering products that make inference trustworthy.
Agentic systems with LangGraph-style orchestration: multi-step reasoning, recovery, tool use, and stateful workflows people can interrupt. Multi-provider LLM routing across Gemini, Claude, GPT, and open models, with fallbacks, evaluation, and observability so model behaviour is measurable. Conversational layers over complex data: copilots, synthesis tools, and generative UI engines that keep a person in the loop. AI-native delivery for the team itself: Cursor and Claude Code paired with design tools, component libraries with AI parts, and habits that land in the repo rather than slides.
Let's talk
If you're building a product and you need the human side of the engineering as well as the system, tell us what you're building and which services you need. Either reach out by email or feel free to book some of our time on our calendar.
hello@thingsthat.comWe're always honest about what we can and can't do. If we're not the right people for it, we'll tell you straight up. We have a large network of incredible designers, engineers and innovators, so if we're not the people, we'll know someone who is.