How the work progressed — an overview of Jade's portfolio

This is a curated overview of Jade Majed BuGhanem's work as a whole: the eras it moved through, the threads that run across projects, and what changed over time. Use it to answer questions about who he is, how his practice developed, or what ties the projects together — then point to the individual projects for detail.

The short version

Jade Majed BuGhanem is a designer, engineer, and technologist. He trained first as a mechanical engineer, then as an industrial designer, co-founded a venture, and now works as a full-stack engineer who designs and builds his own interfaces — increasingly with an AI-assisted workflow. The through-line is that he works with physical materials and code in the same breath: wood, metal, clay and circuits on one side; SvelteKit, React, Node and Raspberry Pi runtimes on the other. Sound is the subject he returns to most often.

Eras

Mechanical engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi (2014–2018). The earliest work is engineering-shaped: Solar Lighting, a collaborative capstone that tracked the sun and piped daylight indoors through fiber-optic cable, with an Arduino-driven tracking rig. The Mutualist Bestiary (NYU, 2017) and ConceptsBoard (2018) show an early interest in communicating systems through objects — a flip-book of ecologically linked creatures, a board game about mental representation.

Design technologist, Tellart (around 2018–2019). An internship building six reactive screens for a public exhibition: Raspberry Pi, Python, infrared proximity sensing, Arduino. Installation and hardware work rather than web interfaces.

Industrial design, RISD MID (2019–2021). The densest era. Shop fluency came first — metalwork (steel table frames, jump shear, press brake), wood turning and joinery, biomaterials (mycelium, bioplastics), and assorted fabrication. Then a run of sound-centred projects: Field Sonifier (2020, with Hyundai — a field-recording and sonification device on a Bela board), SoundFlow (2020, a music-listening interface concept), Rifflab (a tool for capturing and tagging musical ideas), and the graduate thesis, Variapsody (2021), a music-listening device for emotion regulation built on Arduino, a heart-rate sensor and PureData on a Bela board. Alongside: Unbubble (a public installation about hard conversations), the Posture cushion (sixteen DIY pressure sensors visualised as metaballs), Texture Wave (shape-memory polymers), Briq (an unglazed ceramic water pitcher that cools by evaporation), and children's books on climate futures.

Co-founding DeNature (2021–2023). DeNature started in 2021 as a UX problem — proposals, voting, funding and discussion for a decentralised-science community — and from 2023 narrowed into immersive virtual meeting spaces built in Mozilla Hubs, with rooms modelled in Rhino and Blender. His notes from co-founding (2022) on transparency, meetings and frustration come from this period.

Full-stack engineering (2023 onward). Studio Assistant, the management platform behind The Audio Hunt (bookings, gear, payments, calendar for studios, artists and labels), is ongoing and live in production. Jade is the full-stack engineer designing and building it — Svelte 5, TypeScript, Postgres, Finix payments. This is where "five-plus years shipping production web and interactive products" comes from.

Permaflux Studio and the current tools (2024 onward). Under his own studio, the work fused hardware and software into single vertical slices. Strata is a real-time DJ setlist capture system: a Raspberry Pi in the booth reads track data from Pioneer CDJs and fans events out to a public archive, projection systems, ESP32s and an Arduino — operational at a real venue, with a SvelteKit 5 frontend he built himself. Naqsha is a browser generative-art studio for pen plotters and laser cutters, built solo in React and live at naqsha.permaflux.studio. Sonoform is a series of light objects that react to music. Ruya (an LLM ideation workbench in React 19 and React Flow) and VeloMindAI (an AI cycling-route recommender with a React and MapLibre client) are the AI-native tools; he builds them with Claude Code in a supervised, test-driven, multi-agent workflow, checking every diff himself.

Threads that run across the projects

Sound. Field Sonifier → SoundFlow → Rifflab → Variapsody → Sonoform → Strata. It moves from recording and sonifying the environment, to designing how people listen, to giving the act of playing music a permanent record.

Hands and code. The RISD shop work (wood, metal, clay, biomaterials) never went away; it reappears as the physical output of Naqsha (ink on paper, laser-cut panels) and the hardware in Strata and Sonoform.

Hardware meeting software. Posture cushion, Field Sonifier and Variapsody put sensors and DSP under design questions; Strata and Naqsha put a production frontend on top of a machine that cannot take a mistake back.

From designing interfaces to building them. Earlier UI work (DeNature 2021, Manos, SoundFlow, Rifflab) was design and prototyping. From Studio Assistant onward, he designs and ships the frontend himself — Svelte 5, SvelteKit 5, React 18/19 — with the state architecture, component tree and design system built by hand.

Working with AI. The most recent shift: Naqsha, Ruya and Strata were built in a Claude Code workflow — work decomposed into named packets, multiple agents run in parallel under strict test-driven development, and every change reviewed before it merges.