Leonardo Giusti: Archetype AI's co-founder on physical AI and the limits of the chatbot

Mar 25, 2026

Leonardo Giusti, co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Archetype AI and former Google ATAP design lead with a Ph.D. in HCI. He discusses foundation models trained on sensor data, Project Soli and Jacquard’s tangible interactions, why chatbots are a limited interface for the physical world, and designing AI as a tool to augment human intelligence rather than replace it.

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INSIGHT

Study New Tech As A Material

Design practice should treat new technologies as materials to study, not immediate product features.
Leonardo describes running "material studies" (e.g., radar revealing finger micro-movements) to map affordances before defining interaction languages.

ANECDOTE

Project Soli's Data-Hungry Journey

Project Soli began from scientists' curiosity about embedding tiny radar in devices to sense presence and gesture.
The team collected millions of samples (e.g., 5 million swipes) to train ML, showing the high cost of gesture recognition.

INSIGHT

Foundation Models Reduce Sensor Retraining

Foundation models solve scalability of repeated retraining for each sensor task by enabling fine-tuning on new behaviors.
Leonardo explains Archetype's idea: build a sensor foundation model so new use cases need far less data.

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Leonardo Giusti has spent his career in the spaces between disciplines — between art and science, between research and product, between the physical world and the digital one. It’s not a conventional design path, but it’s one that led him to work most designers never get near.

This is a preview of a premium episode. Find the full episode on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/leonardo-giusti

Leonardo is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Archetype AI, a company building foundation models trained not on text or images, but on the continuous stream of sensor data flowing from the real world, like factories, power grids, and city intersections.

Before that, he spent nearly seven years at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, where he led design on Project Soli — a miniature radar chip that taught devices to understand human gesture and presence — and Project Jacquard, which wove interactivity into everyday objects like Levi’s jackets and YSL bags. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the University of Florence and spent years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Design Lab. He’s also filed more than 30 patents (!).

What makes Leonardo’s thinking distinctive is his insistence that the metaphors we use to describe AI shape everything — how we build it, how we regulate it, and who it ends up serving. He’s skeptical of the dominant vision of AI as an autonomous agent that does things for us, and is pushing toward something different: AI as a tool we think with.

In this conversation, we get into his unusual path to design through cognitive science and robotics, what it actually means to treat emerging technology as a design material, why the chatbot is a primitive interface for the physical world, and why he believes augmenting human intelligence might be the most important design challenge of our time.

Bio

Leonardo Giusti, Ph.D., is an award-winning design and research director. With over 15 years of experience, he excels in transforming R&D projects into innovative hardware, software, and AI products.

Prior to Archetype AI, Leonardo was the Head of Design at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, UX Design and Product Lead at Samsung Design and R&D and interaction design lead at MIT Design Lab. Leonardo was a Post-doctoral Associate at MIT Design Labs and completed his Ph.D, in human-computer interaction at the University of Florence.

He has filed more than 30 patents, and published more than 40 scientific papers. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Fast Company and other recognized magazines.