The person behind the work
I think by
making things.
I’m Marco van Hylckama Vlieg, a product designer and creative technologist based in West Linn, Oregon.
The portfolio experiment
This portfolio is 100% fake.
Made up by OpenAI Astra.
Every project, research session, participant quote, client and collaborator names, design process, usability test, and outcome in these five case studies was invented. The screenshots, sketches, wireframes, component libraries and interactive prototypes, and sticky-note workshop photos were created to support the story. None of this work actually happened.
I asked OpenAI Astra to create a convincing portfolio for a senior product and UX designer. This entire portfolio is the result: a polished collection of completely made-up work, presented with all the familiar signals of credibility.
The point of this experiment is simple: it is now trivial to create a very convincing-looking portfolio that is completely fabricated. Someone trying to land a UX job can manufacture the projects, the process, the evidence, and the results without ever doing the work.
A polished portfolio can tell a persuasive story. It can no longer prove that the story happened. Hiring needs to look beyond the artifact and test the thinking behind it.
Designer. Builder.
Perpetually curious.
I like the part where it starts to make sense.
The messy brief. The complicated workflow. The moment when the team knows something isn’t working, but hasn’t quite found the right question yet. That’s usually where I can help.
I’ve spent more than 25 years working across design and technology. Today, my work sits at the intersection of product strategy, user experience, and the practical possibilities of AI.
I’m comfortable in a research session, a design critique, or a code editor. Moving between those perspectives helps me find ideas that are useful to people and realistic for the team building them.
I care about the feel of the finished thing. I care just as much about whether we solved the right problem.
What you get when we work together.
A point of view, held lightly.
I make the reasoning visible, ask awkward questions early, and change direction when the evidence asks us to.
Something we can react to.
A sketch, a prototype, a working slice of the product. Tangible things make conversations more useful.
The details that add up.
The empty state, the interrupted task, the sentence on a button. Small decisions are the experience.
The small decisions, made visible.
An empty result should explain how to recover. An interrupted handoff should preserve what is done. A missing number should never quietly become zero.
Where my curiosity is taking me.
AI is making it easier to produce something that looks finished. It’s also making judgment more valuable: knowing what to build, how to evaluate it, and when a confident answer deserves another question.
I’m interested in products that make people more capable, in teams that leave room for experimentation, and in the relationship between making things and understanding them.
See that thinking in practice