Hello, I'm Daniel Arcé.
I'm a design technologist. I work on products where the interaction model and the technical model are hard to separate: AI-assisted tools, data-heavy interfaces, accessibility-critical workflows, and prototypes that need to survive contact with real system constraints.
I started in interactive media and design technology, then spent much of my career building front-end systems for media companies, consumer products, and SaaS teams. That engineering depth changed how I design: I can test an interaction against the actual data model, browser or platform behavior, accessibility tree, and failure states before a handoff turns those constraints into surprises.
At PhotoShelter I combined product R&D with accessibility work on a digital-asset-management platform. I led the WCAG 2.1 audit and remediation for contracts that had to demonstrate compliance, and a workflow-automation prototype surfaced integration problems early enough to cut the later implementation work by an internal estimate of roughly 30%. The case carries the figures and where they come from.
My recent independent work moves further upstream. Semantic Image Search is a local-first macOS product for searching and exploring photo libraries with on-device models. WorkBay and its adjacent design R&D treat workflow and interaction structure as durable, versioned state rather than information that has to be reconstructed from a chat transcript or codebase on every pass.
I also maintain Heuristics Canon, a source-linked set of decision rules I use to review product, interaction, accessibility, AI, and engineering work. The useful part is not the size of the corpus; it is that a design claim can point to a rule, a source, and the artifact that changed because of it.
I'm most interested in senior product and design-engineering work where ambiguity is real, the interface has to explain complex system behavior, and a prototype is expected to answer product questions rather than decorate them.
Portrait by Liam Maloney