Pienso is an AI company that works with governments, media companies, pharmaceutical companies and other knowledge-based industries, helping them use their expertise to build, implement and train custom language models without the need to write any code.
Pienso’s design-led approach is an almost rebellious push towards progressing AI. It emphasises genuine understanding of data, by giving industry specialists the tools to create models, elevating users above technocrats. This approach yields more targeted outcomes and fosters curiosity, exploration, and hands-on learning through its design. By prioritising the user’s interaction with their technology, Pienso’s models effectively bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence.
In a landscape riddled with dysfunctional AI models prone to hallucinations, errors, and data misuse, Pienso offers a thoughtful alternative. By returning control to its users, Pienso presents a radically optimistic, almost utopian vision of technology, echoing the mid-century promise of technological modernisation, fostered in institutions such as the MIT Human Computer Interaction lab, Xerox Parc, and influenced by Modernist and Bauhaus philosophies.
Pienso’s AI interface is designed to be highly adaptive to its users and their field of knowledge. It’s a playbox of Lego blocks to be assembled in ways that best suit the functional goal. By empowering experts to explore and understand data independently—without the need for developers who might view large language models (LLMs) primarily as technical challenges—the platform maximises the potential of AI. This efficiency supports crucial industries like healthcare, media, and government, generating insights that are profoundly, and specifically, relevant. Pienso’s product gives the people within an organisation who know the most about a subject the ability to easily interrogate and understand their data, leading to high-quality deployment of AI, from identifying and fighting global disinformation to accurately analysing customer complaints.
Pienso was founded by Karthik Dinakar and Birago Jones, influenced by the Bauhaus-inspired design and computing discourse at MIT Media Lab. Understanding Modernism as a way of thinking, rather than just a design aesthetic, profoundly shaped Pienso's approach. In today's digital context, this meant incorporating cognitive design, UI, and UX alongside computer engineering—not just to create something beautiful, but to forge something genuinely helpful and culturally significant.
During their time at MIT, Dinakar and Jones realised that the challenges with underperforming large language models (LLMs) were less about technology and more about human engagement and design craft. They recognised that human expertise is crucial for creating AI that is not only powerful and insightful but also accountable. Their solution was to build an intuitive, design-led platform with accessible AI tools that empower both experts and novices.
Pienso approached Pentagram with a task to create a compelling, modern design language that embodies the business’ unique approach to tackling fundamental issues through AI. The result is a refreshed visual identity that effectively conveys and embeds Pienso’s philosophy, and the historic and academic influences to their design approach, into a cohesive visual identity suited for today’s landscape of bleeding-edge AI development.
Pentagram created a new brand persona and tone of voice centred on the ‘Optimistic Navigator’, representing hope, confidence and forward momentum. This idea serves as a metaphor for users who explore the complexities of AI with optimism, leveraging their unique expertise to learn new skills that foster creativity and independence, while maintaining a focus on safety, privacy, and data integrity.
With their experience in designing for the AI industry, Pentagram drew on Pienso’s unique position—occupying the sweet spot where humanity, technology, design and functionality meet. The design team created a graphically reductive identity to make Pienso’s features easy to grasp, with striking, colourful elements to engage the audience and communicate the learning-through-play nature of Pienso’s product. At its core the identity is stripped-back, but results in a bold and purposeful design that challenges the notion that AI is just ‘black-box magic’.
At the heart of the brand is a visual narrative that tells the story of Pienso’s software platform. The digital product’s features are manifested as interchangeable modular tools, represented by simple geometric blocks in the vibrant brand colours. Throughout the identity these blocks are shown in various totemic combinations, highlighting the adaptable, bespoke solutions Pienso offers.
Pienso’s existing logo, consisting of three aligned prisms, was retained but updated to be more cohesive and to create alignment with both the form language of the coloured blocks and the new, bespoke wordmark. All three elements communicate approachability, balanced but purposeful playfulness, and a level of design sophistication reminiscent of mid-century design craft.
The new typographic system uses Helvetica® Now, an updated version of the modernist staple. The colour palette, inspired by the vibrancy of Murial Cooper and Jaqueline Casey’s work at MIT, uses black and white to create focus in contrast to bold, articulating blocks of bright colour. Both palettes balance their referential legacy with a directness and freshness relevant to Pienso’s forward-looking vision.
With its new website designed by Pentagram and built by Commerce-UI, Pienso offers a compelling, easy-to-navigate platform. To demystify Pienso’s technology, it was important to showcase real-life use cases, using branded diagrams and extracted product visualisation throughout the case studies. The Pentagram team also created an imagined ‘Pienso workshop’, a fictional space that grounds the vibrant blocks in a realistic, tangible environment, bringing texture to brand communications through a library of render images and forwarding a narrative of tactile interaction and emergent exploration.
Pienso challenges us to rethink AI, highlighting how LLMs can combine technology with human needs through a design-led approach. Pentagram’s tone of voice and design system represents Pienso’s empowerment of individuals rather than catering to the incumbent big tech zeitgeist, transforming AI into a tool of control and purpose, creating a bridge to an AI-powered future that is accessible to everyone. This approach fosters a community where everyone is welcome to experiment, create, and learn.
The new brand highlights a purposeful connection to Pienso’s origins, enabling the company to transition smoothly to the next stage of its development and push its pioneering work even further. Pienso offers a hopeful alternative to the often-dystopian views of technology’s future, with AI shaped by design and guided by human insight. This vision promotes a future where AI is optimistic, practical, and powerful, and where technology serves humanity, and not the other way around.
