About
BASED OUT OF
BEL <> USA
INFORMATION WE COLLECT
I'm Head of Design at Playground in Atlanta, and the founder of ETHBelgium. I've been building things on the internet since I was 12. I started with an autoplaying video background and a voice that played on page load, which I think tells you most of what you need to know about how I work.
By 16 I was doing freelance frontend for clients across the world. By 19 I'd done founding design at Eden. Among that and everything else in between, I run design at Playground now. We're an AI design company. The work spans more than design, which is the only kind of work I want to do.
In parallel, I started ETHBelgium because Belgium didn't have a serious onchain community and the gap was too obvious to ignore. We've built partnerships with major tech companies and academic institutions, and I've ended up in policy conversations on digital identity I did not see coming when I started.
I've spoken about all this at EthCC, ETHBelgrade, and NapulETH. My EthCC[9] talk on the permissionless UX paradox is on YouTube somewhere. I'm based between Atlanta and Mechelen, where I'm finishing a B.A. in International Experience Design at Thomas More University.
This page is a work in progress. My twitter is probably where I think out loud most often.
For work, jhaa.xyz. For the longer story, whois.jhaa.xyz.
SOME THINGS I BELIEVE IN:
Constraints are mostly made up. The merging of disciplines is liberating, not diluting. Design, engineering, narrative, ops, ecosystem work, none of it is actually separate when you're trying to build something good. Treating them as one surface area is the most useful thing I've figured out.
Aesthetics are not decoration. The way a thing looks and feels is a load-bearing claim about what it is and who it's for. People who treat aesthetics as separate from substance are wrong about both.
On speed. The faster you ship, the faster you learn what's actually true. Most disagreements about strategy dissolve once someone puts a real thing in front of real users. I have low patience for meetings that should have been a prototype.
On culture. Products are downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of the people who care enough to shape it. The internet keeps trying to flatten this and keeps failing, which I find encouraging.
On the people I want to work with. Direct, kind, allergic to gatekeeping, willing to be wrong out loud. Life is short and I'd rather be honest than smooth. The best collaborators are the ones who challenge me without making it a performance.
On travel. Different cities make you a different person. The version of me that exists in Belgium is not the version that exists in New York or Cannes or Tokyo or MIlan, and the differences are information. I trust my judgment more after I've moved through somewhere unfamiliar.
On optimism. I think the world is mostly getting more interesting, mostly getting more abundant, and mostly inhabited by people who want to make things better even when they disagree about how. I treat pessimism the same way I treat any other aesthetic choice: occasionally useful but easy to overdo.
On what I'm doing here. I think we're in one of the rare moments when several technologies that fundamentally change how humans coordinate are arriving at the same time. AI, crypto, the way both reshape identity and trust. Designing the surfaces where people meet these systems is one of the more important things to be doing right now, and I want to do it for as long as it stays interesting.