LRP.
OPEN TO BUILD

// PROFILEAI ARCHITECTSOFTWARE DEVELOPERCRITICAL MAKER

Laurensius Rivian Pratama

“How can I keep my love for the inanimate in an ever-changing world?”

I design intelligence into things. A double threat trained in industrial design and digital product engineering, I build deep-tech R&D, empathetic AI, and hardware-software systems that give objects a voice - and give people a reason to care for them again.

View the workGitHub
rivian.profile
handle
@rivianpratama
role
AI Architect / Maker
base
Industrial Design, ITB
gpa
3.66 / 4.00
academy
Apple Dev Academy '23
award
Swift Student Challenge '24
commits
1,000+ contributions
$ building empathetic objects
// THE STORYThree acts, one throughline.
  1. 01ACT 01

    THE INHERITANCE

    Born into a family of engineers and architects.

    Growing up surrounded by people who built physical things, I learned early that objects carry intention. That inheritance pulled me toward Industrial Design at ITB - learning how form, material, and meaning are negotiated before anything is ever made.

  2. 02ACT 02

    THE TRANSITION

    From shaping matter to shaping intelligence.

    Industrial design taught me to care about things; software let me give them a mind. At the Apple Developer Academy I crossed fully into digital product engineering - SwiftUI, AI, and systems - without ever putting down the maker's eye for craft and context.

  3. 03ACT 03

    THE MISSION

    An antidote to the 21st-century epidemic of dissatisfaction.

    We are surrounded by more objects than ever and attached to fewer of them. My work builds empathy with the inanimate: AI and hardware that make products feel worth keeping, worth understanding, worth loving - a small counter to the depression and disposability of modern life.

// SELECTED WORKSix case studies, grouped into three acts.
1

ACT 1

Reading the inanimate

Systems that try to understand, honestly and within limits.

/01 · R&D Lab · Empathetic AI

Lauren's Crib

An empathetic AI that reads how you behave, not just what you type.

The problem
Advice tools tend to either flatter you or judge you, and the ones that try to help usually do it by hoovering up everything they can. Real empathy needs to read behaviour honestly - but that reading runs straight into the boundary of privacy. How much of a person should a model be allowed to know before help quietly becomes surveillance?
The outcome
An empathetic chatbot that works as a relationship advisor by inferring patterns from how people behave over time, not just the words in a single message - paired with a deliberate, designed line around what it stores and what it is allowed to surface. The harder the model leans on behaviour, the more explicit that boundary has to be.
  • LLM workflows
  • Empathetic AI
  • Privacy
Read →
2

ACT 2

Giving objects a voice

Hardware and material work that lets things speak and be kept.

/02 · AI Object · Conversational Hardware

Babblin Wastebin

A waste bin that argues for its own usefulness.

The problem
We discard objects the moment they stop being convenient, and waste bins are the most ignored objects of all - mute, anonymous, easy to misuse. A silent bin can't ask to be used correctly, and it certainly can't make anyone care about what goes into it.
The outcome
An anthropomorphic, AI-powered bin built on the Babblin conversational core. It speaks for itself: reacting to what it's fed, nudging people toward the right behaviour, and turning a piece of invisible infrastructure into something with a point of view. The bin becomes a small argument that even waste deserves attention.
  • Conversational AI
  • Anthropomorphism
  • Hardware
Read →
/03 · Material Upcycling · Circular Economy

Selayar Buoy

Bottle caps reborn as buoys for seaweed farmers.

The problem
Seaweed farmers in Selayar need cheap, reliable floats to hold their growing lines at the surface. Commercial buoys cost money they would rather not spend, while plastic bottle caps pile up as near-worthless waste nearby. Two problems sitting next to each other, unconnected.
The outcome
A method to turn discarded plastic bottle caps into low-cost floating buoys for seaweed lines - waste from one stream becoming working infrastructure in another. The value isn't only the float; it's proving the loop can close locally, with the people who farm the water.
  • Upcycling
  • Circular economy
  • Marine
Read →
/04 · Experimental Footwear · Generative Design

JFW Shoes

Footwear grown by algorithm, not drawn by hand.

The problem
Footwear design leans on the hand and the eye, which means it tends to repeat familiar forms. Generative systems can find structures a designer would never draw - but they usually produce shapes that ignore how a shoe has to fit, flex, and be made.
The outcome
A set of experimental shoes for Jakarta Fashion Week whose geometry is generated computationally and then disciplined by the realities of the body and manufacture. The form is unmistakably algorithmic, but it is still a shoe.
  • Generative design
  • Footwear
  • 3D modelling
Read →
3

ACT 3

Living the future

Art and narrative that let people feel a circular world.

/05 · Visual Novel · Narrative Game

Upcycled 2045

A near-future where upcycling is survival, told as a visual novel.

The problem
Sustainability is usually communicated as instruction - statistics, guilt, rules - which people tune out. The circular economy is a way of living, but it's almost always argued rather than experienced.
The outcome
A visual novel set in 2045, where upcycling isn't a virtue but a baseline for getting by. By making the player live inside that world and make its choices, the project turns an abstract principle into something lived-in and felt.
  • Game design
  • Narrative
  • Circular economy
Read →
/06 · Art Exhibition · Sentient Object

Sitting with Jakarta

A sentient chair that has something to say about the city.

The problem
Furniture is the most overlooked thing we touch every day - we sit on chairs without ever considering them as witnesses. And a city as dense and contradictory as Jakarta is hard to talk about directly without flattening it.
The outcome
An installation built around a sentient chair: furniture given a point of view, asking visitors to literally sit with the city through an object that has quietly absorbed it. The chair becomes a way to feel Jakarta from an unexpected, patient vantage point.
  • Art
  • Anthropomorphism
  • Exhibition
Read →
// THE LABSoftware experiments running inside Lauren's Crib.
AI Persona

Essair

A neurotic Socrates - an AI persona built to challenge your reasoning instead of agreeing with you, interrogating the cracks in an argument until the thinking gets sharper.

  • Reasoning
  • Conversational AI
Realtime Audio + AI

Noisotron

A simulated live chat of AI critics roasting the real-time acoustics of a room, turning ambient sound into a running, opinionated commentary feed.

  • Realtime audio
  • Multi-agent
Spatial / 3DGS

Bekrum

A 3D Gaussian Splatting project capturing and rendering real scenes as dense, photoreal point fields you can move through.

  • 3D Gaussian Splatting
  • Graphics
Conversational AI

Babblin AI

Conversational AI that gives everyday objects a voice, so people relate to, understand, and hold onto them instead of throwing them away.

  • Voice
  • Anthropomorphism
// OTHER PROJECTSExplorations carried by a single question each.

  1. Repair Prints

    Can a printed part make repair feel like a right, not a workaround?

  2. Listening Spoons

    What would a kitchen tool say if it paid attention to how you cook?

  3. Micro Kinetics

    How little motion does an object need before it feels alive?

  4. Ghost Textiles

    Can fabric carry the memory of the body that wore it?

  5. Consent Cards

    How do you design consent into an object before it ever speaks?

  6. Harbor Resonance

    What does a place sound like when its objects answer back?

// ARCHIVEEarlier and speculative work.
  1. 01

    PINDAD AYAM

    2025

    What happens when heavy industry is asked to make something tender?

  2. 02

    MyopiaSim

    2024

    How does the world change when you design for the way it's actually seen?

  3. 03

    CABLIÉT

    2022

    Can the things we hide away - cables, clutter - be designed with dignity?

  4. 04

    KARYA MACHINA

    2022

    What is the machine's hand worth next to the maker's?

// STACKWhat I build with.

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • Swift
  • Python
  • Rust
  • COBOL

Frameworks

  • SwiftUI
  • Next.js
  • React
  • Vue

Focus

  • LLM workflows
  • 3D Gaussian Splatting
  • Hardware systems

// CONTACT

Let’s give the inanimate a voice.

GitHubgithub.com/rivianpratamaLinkedInlinkedin.com/in/rivianpSiteitsrivian.space
@rivianpratamaLaurensius Rivian Pratama · AI Architect & Critical Maker