Marco Zamarato is a systems strategist and R&D lead working across design, governance, and narrative. He designs products, teams, protocols, and stories for systems in transition, from AI diffusion to climate adaptation and demographic change, and prototypes the alternatives they might become.
Ways of working
Early-stage R&D
Hands-on collaboration on AI products, infrastructures, and the narratives that make them adoptable.Teaching and speaking
Systems thinking and design as a way of reasoning beyond traditional digital product design.Advisory and executive roles
Strategic advisory, boards, and fractional or interim design and R&D leadership.
Background
I grew up in the northern Italian countryside, an hour from Milan and from the Olivetti campus in Ivrea, with an early fascination for computers. But I came to interaction design late, after studying semiotics and cinema and a few years of writing about both. What stayed with me is that a story is a system people move through, and the interesting parts are the structures, rules, and defaults below the surface of words.
My first design projects were, unsurprisingly, games and stories you could walk into: interactive gamebooks and an alternate-reality TV series. Then research labs in Europe and California, and a decade inside one of the largest R&D organizations in technology, always working on what comes next: software that runs without being installed, an operating system that composes itself from context, the first frameworks for personal AI agents, and privacy infrastructure for machine learning on the phone in your pocket. Along the way I managed teams of designers, researchers, strategists, and engineers, and the programs that shape how AI is understood outside the labs.
In 2026 I went independent. Under Over Through is my research, production, and publishing studio: new narratives about climate adaptation, demographic change, and AI diffusion, each one bound to the research behind it.
Selected work
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essay
Kill the Apps.
Forthcoming in an ACM volume on the turning points of human-computer interaction. -
project
The Knots.
An immersive audio narrative set in a world reshaped by climate, AI automation, and radical experiments in living together. The first piece from Under Over Through, previewed at Stella Matutina, Hertenstein, Switzerland. -
talk
Soft Infrastructures & Undesigning Design.
Panel at MakeShift 2026, New York Design Week. -
talk
Not Here, Not Now.
A conversation with Anthony Dunne on design imagination and soft infrastructures for a hard world. -
project
Generative Dreams.
Participatory generative-AI design with young adults at a trauma-informed arts center. ACM CHI. -
project
Illuminate.
A Google Labs experiment in AI-generated audio conversations, where the design work was the model's behavior. Its workflow later became NotebookLM Audio Overviews. -
essay
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essay
Undesigning AI.
Infrastructure, worldbuilding, and the new roles of designers. Lecture and conference volume. -
project
Private Compute Core.
Provably private on-device machine learning for Android, shipped in Android 12. -
project
Fuchsia.
An operating system built from scratch, composing experiences from context; shipped on Google Home Hub hardware. Patented the operating-system-level distributed ambient computing underneath it. -
project
Personal AI agent frameworks.
The UX and behavioral boundaries for a personal agent orchestrating many others: what it may do, ask, or refuse. An internal research project, years before large language models made it practical. -
guide
People + AI Guidebook.
Contributor to the chapter on user needs and success metrics. -
project
Android Instant Apps.
Software that runs without being installed.
Contact
Based in NYC. Often in Europe and Asia.
info at under-over-through dot co