John Hanacek, M.A.
John Hanacek, M.A. is a Product Design Engineer at JHDesign, an independent design studio, where he works as a founding designer for early-stage teams building AI-native, agentic, and spatial computing products. He brings 14 years of experience across AI, web, 3D, and extended reality (XR).
Through JHDesign, which he has run since 2013, John provides design engineering, brand development, workshop facilitation, and agentic workflow coaching. In 2026, he led the founding design for OpenProse, a Y Combinator Spring 2026 startup building open-source infrastructure for reliable, long-running AI agent workflows, developing its brand and five logo directions and building 137 homepage approaches as live pages across 471 commits before settling on one canonical style.
In 2025, he designed the MVP demo platform for Transfyr, handing off the design as Claude-generated HTML brought into Figma and producing synthetic data for the demo build, ahead of the company’s emergence from stealth with a $25 million seed round to bring physical AI to scientific labs. He also designed and shipped JH Coaching OS, an AI coaching product that leaves clients with a chief-of-staff agent set up around their work. His research project MetaMedium: AI Beyond Chat proposes a framework for diagrammatic human–AI communication on a shared canvas.
From 2022 to 2024, John was Lead XR Product & Interaction Designer at Nanome, a collaborative molecular visualization and drug discovery platform, where he prototyped hand-tracking, controller, and voice interactions for scientists exploring atomic structures in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality. He led XR design for Nanome 2, introducing a wrist-based menu system and a “Spotlight and Follow” collaboration paradigm. Read XR Product Design Case Study — Nanome 2.
He spoke in the Creator Lightning Round at AWE USA 2024, and was featured in Dominique Wu’s book Spatial Design: Breaking the 2D Paradigm. Watch AWE Talk 2024 Lightning Round and There is No Spoon — Designing for XR as the New Medium, his mentor talk for the IDEO- and Meta-sponsored XR Design Challenge. Read his newsletter Spatial & Immersive Design.
Between 2021 and 2022, John was Immersive UI/UX Designer at BadVR, an immersive data visualization platform. From 2019 to 2021, he was founding CEO of AvatarMEDIC, which he cofounded with our Susan Ip-Jewell as a venture dedicated to improving healthcare quality and accessibility through frontier technologies, and completed the Founder Institute in San Francisco in 2020.
He was lead author, with Ip-Jewell, of Developing General AI, Blockchain, & AR/MR for Emergency Medical Triage, Disaster Relief and Remote Medical Rescue for analog astronauts living in I.C.E, presented at the 2019 International Astronautical Congress. That year he also designed and built 3D assets for SAR 5G, a search-and-rescue coordination app that won Best VR/AR/MR or Gaming Solution at the AT&T 5G Hackathon, on a team that included Ip-Jewell. AvatarMEDIC then teamed with VRT-U and the First Responder Institute on an augmented reality heads-up display for first responders in the NIST CHARIoT Challenge.
From 2015 to 2018, John was lead conceptual and UX designer for Collaborate.org, a social action platform for coordinating global efforts on grand challenges. Between 2011 and 2020, he was President of CanCoverIt, an attic insulation product for recessed lighting accepted into SCEIN as an innovative energy-efficiency product, handling its brand design, multimedia, and business development. Earlier, he was primary photographer at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute (Calit2) from 2010 to 2012, photo editor at the UCSD Guardian, and a beach lifeguard with California State Parks from 2007 to 2011.
A writer on technology and power, John published Internet as “Answer Engine,” Part I and Part II on the Atlantic Council’s FutureSource blog in 2014, anticipating an AI-driven internet that proactively delivers answers rather than search results. His essay Beyond Network Feudalism, published in HuffPost and republished by the Atlantic Council, responded to Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society by warning that centralized networks could create a new digital feudalism. In 2014, Kevin Kelly chose his scenario as the winner of his desirable-future challenge. Read A Desirable-Future Haiku.
His 2023 collection Fractal Futures: Stories of Possibility gathers 19 interlinked science fiction stories on personhood, technology, power, and grace, which our David Brin described as thoughtful ruminations on the bright and dark possibilities ahead. Read his Contributions on Medium.
John earned his M.A. in Communication, Culture & Technology in 2016 from Georgetown University’s CCT program, with the thesis Symbols that Do, Intention that Desires, Hands that Enact. At Georgetown, he was a Graduate Associate at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship and Outreach Coordinator for gnovis, the program’s peer-reviewed, student-run journal.
He coauthored Capturing, Tracing, and Visualizing the Spread of Technology-Enhanced Instructional Strategies, presented at EDULEARN15 in Barcelona. He earned his B.A. in Political Science International Relations in 2012 from UC San Diego, where his thesis was A Taste of Armageddon: Examining Drone Strikes in an Ethical and Practical Context.
Between 2014 and 2025, John was Cofounder and Board Member of the Global Co Lab Network, which empowers teens worldwide to act on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He helped launch its Teens Dream global video contest by assembling its website, designing its logo, and co-directing its first promotional video.
John is based in San Diego and is also a photographer, videographer, and visual artist. Read Check out John Hanacek’s Artwork.
Visit his website, writing and art site, LinkedIn profile, ResearchGate profile, and GitHub page. Follow him on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and X.