Aaron Aalto is a design engineer who builds product interfaces and software, working at the intersection of design and code with an AI-native workflow.Aalto has designed the cover and NFT identity for The Network State, a book by the entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, and maintains an extensive personal practice in generative and creative coding.
Aalto has worked as a design engineer at Anterior, an AI health company, building the nurse-facing AI copilot used for navigating patient records and the internal tooling used to improve its underlying language models.Earlier design work includes a redesign of the Mayo Clinic's Executive Health experience, industrial design for Bang & Olufsen's first wireless in-ear and over-ear headphones, and lighting design for Louis Poulsen. Aalto was previously a product designer at Industrious, a coworking company, where the work included its first iOS app.
For The Network State, Aalto translated Balaji Srinivasan's thesis about internet-native communities becoming 'startup societies' into a system of diagrams, symbols and a book cover, released together with an NFT identity.Aalto also made Leashed In, a self-initiated satire of professional networking reimagined as a pet social feed, designing and building the interface to keep the joke usable as a real product.Other self-initiated creative-coding studies include Stem, a generative simulation of organic branching growth, and Curvy, an exploration of generative curves and motion built from simple controls.,
In a personal essay, Aalto has described treating artificial intelligence itself as a design material, learned through direct experimentation the way an industrial designer learns the constraints of wood or metal. Aalto has warned against a “need for speed” that comes from using large language models to accelerate design work, arguing that slowing down, researching and incubating remain important parts of the creative process.
