Gavin Steen is a designer, technologist and entrepreneur
I've spent more than twenty five years working with technology and building digital products and businesses. I'm particularly interested in what happens when technology makes things that were previously difficult, expensive or specialised, dramatically easier to create. AI is accelerating that process. And it raises a question I keep coming back to:
About me
My background is in design and user experience.
Over time, my work has moved increasingly towards the point where design, technology and business meet. As the web developed, the boundaries between those disciplines became harder to separate.
A website wasn't simply a piece of visual communication. It was an interface. An interface became part of a product. A product depended on technology. And a successful product ultimately depended on understanding the people using it, the problem it was solving and the business around it.
My work followed that progression.
I moved from design and user experience into digital products, software and eventually building digital businesses of my own.
Today, most of my work sits somewhere between design, product, technology and entrepreneurship.
Work
Verse
A small digital product studio working with founders and organisations to turn ideas and complicated processes into useful digital products. We work across product thinking, user experience, interface design and software development. Modern tools — and increasingly AI — allow a very small team to move from understanding a problem to designing and building a working solution remarkably quickly.
Maker/OS
A practical education platform for people building digital businesses. The tools required to create a digital product are becoming dramatically more accessible. But easier creation doesn't remove the difficult questions: what should you build, who needs it, how do you test it, and how does it become a business? Maker/OS is being built around those questions.
Writing
I write about technology, entrepreneurship, digital products and the changing economics of creation. Much of my current thinking starts with a simple idea: technology changes value by changing scarcity. As previously specialised capabilities become easier to access, the difficult questions move elsewhere.
Software is becoming abundant
What happens when building software is no longer the difficult part? For most of the software industry's history, the ability to build has been scarce. That constraint is beginning to disappear.
The rise of the one-person company
How much organisation does an organisation need? AI is changing the relationship between capability and headcount — and potentially the minimum viable size of a company.
Why building is no longer the hard part
As the cost of making falls, the difficult questions move elsewhere. What should we build? Who is it for? Why should it exist? And how will anyone discover it?
After Abundance
I'm also developing After Abundance, a separate editorial project exploring a broader question: What becomes valuable when technology makes something else abundant? It takes the idea beyond my own work and looks more broadly at how abundance changes value — across technology, business, media, knowledge and society.