About

I'm David Nuñez. I make to think. I learn more from a rough prototype than from a polished deck, so I build the thing and watch what it does.

I've been doing some version of this for decades. At the MIT Media Lab I did my graduate work in the Personal Robots group, on how people and robots get along, then joined Opera of the Future and put robots on stage beside human performers. In Brooklyn I ran an interaction studio that designed art, technology and interfaces for brands like Cartier and Cadillac, including prototyping the store of the future for Target. I was the inaugural Director of Technology for the new MIT Museum, which is where I learned what a crowd does with technology once it's in the room. Then I spent two years at Harvard's Baker Library watching a hundred-year research collection meet AI.

I've been around long enough to watch technology rearrange ordinary life a few times over: the web turning into a place you could sell tickets, the phone becoming the thing in everyone's pocket, robots leaving the lab for the stage, screens showing up in stores and museums. What's arriving now has a shape I recognize, and it still feels new to me. So for now I'm putting all of my working time into independent research: building small prototypes of what's coming and writing down what I learn from them. The rest of the time I'm trying to stay a whole person, and I think the work's better for it.

From late August through the end of 2026 I'm running an experiment: a season of finishing things. I'll be building small, half-serious pieces of the future so we can find out what they do to us before they show up uninvited. The Log is the receipt.

Off My Bench is where most of this lands first. If something I'm building makes you think "I wonder what that looks like in my world," that's usually the start of a good conversation. Let's have it.