About · Rohan Saraf

c. 1998 · The instinct

The kid who opened things and fixed things

Before design had a name, there was a screwdriver. Radios, tape decks, the mixer — anything with a seam got opened. Not to break it: to see how the parts explained each other. Most came back to life.

Everything since has been the same move at larger scale: open the system, find the logic, put it back together so it makes sense. The systems got bigger — banks, hospitals, AI agents. The instinct never changed.

2011 – 2014 · Hardware years

Design with physical consequence

After a detour through engineering that taught me what I didn't want, MIT Institute of Design in Pune gave the instinct a discipline: product design. The first jobs were physical.

An internship at Notion Ink on the second-generation Adam tablet. Then Embrace Innovations, designing a low-cost infant incubator for rural neonatal care — working with clinicians and caregivers where a design failure is measured in lives, not conversions. Then a tablet education platform at IL&FS, with dashboards for teachers, parents, and administrators.

Three products, one lesson: constraints are the design brief. Low resources, low literacy, low tolerance for error.

MIT ID, PuneNotion Ink · 2011Embrace · 2012–13IL&FS · 2013–14

2015 – 2018 · Human Factors International

User error is usually a failure of system design

At HFI I became a Certified Usability Analyst and inherited HFE's founding insight: when the human fails, look at the system. Two projects made it permanent.

HDFC Bank: five different labels for one task, because the data lived on five backend systems. We couldn't change the backend — so the design absorbed the routing and gave users one label. Standard Bank: a voice-only IVR for low-literacy users in South Africa, where moving one word in a sentence changed whether people completed the task. An audio interface with no visual affordances, operated purely through language — a proto-agent design problem, a decade early.

Senior HF SpecialistCUA certifiedHDFC · Standard Bank

2018 – 2022 · The Minimalist

Building the machine that makes the thing

As AVP & Head of Experience Design and Technology, I joined a practice of six and left an organisation of 46 across UX, UI, engineering, and delivery — with a second hub opened in Bangalore during COVID, hired and integrated entirely remotely.

We directed 90+ digital product initiatives across healthcare, fintech, retail, and enterprise, and formalised the company's UX methodology — research, usability testing, and UX advisory as service lines, not favours.

What I was actually building wasn't the projects. It was the practice that produced them — a pattern that keeps repeating.

AVP & Head, XD&T6 → 4690+ initiativesMumbai → Bangalore

2022 – present · GE HealthCare

Where the complexity is epistemic, not visual

Three roles in three years — Lead, Architect, now Senior Architect, Interaction Design — across the Patient Care Solutions portfolio: clinical decision support, virtual care, operational analytics.

The flagship: a clinical decision support platform that reads EMRs, devices, and hospital systems to surface care-plan recommendations to bedside clinicians. Its no-code protocol authoring system lets hospitals update care pathways in minutes instead of months. Alongside it: Mural, a virtual-care platform for remote ICU monitoring, and analytics for ICU and Labor & Delivery.

Here a design mistake isn't a lost conversion — it's a patient outcome. The discipline that demands is the most valuable thing the job teaches.

Senior Architect · Nov 2024Architect · 2023Lead · Aug 2022Patient Care Solutions

2025 – present · The AI Laboratory

Build systems and observe what they actually do

Alongside the day job, I run an independent AI laboratory on infrastructure I design and maintain — 9 systems live in production. Not demos: autonomous agents, an ambient wellness companion writing real data into Apple Health, a multi-agent deliberation engine, a local LLM workspace, an agent-first OS prototype.

The research contribution: Agent Factors Engineering (AFE) — an 8-principle framework for software that AI agents can operate, published as a live audit tool and a 100+ product index at agentability.io. HFE asked what the human operator needs. AFE asks what the agent operator needs. Same question, new operator.

The method is the same one from 1998: open the system, watch what it actually does, make it make sense. This time the systems think back.

9 live systemsAFE frameworkagentability.ioSelf-hosted

01 / 06 — the instinct

fig. 0 — the first interface: a cassette deck, opened

Adam tablet · Notion Ink

Industrial + interaction design, gen 2

’11

Infant incubator · Embrace

Neonatal care for low-resource settings

’12

Education platform · IL&FS

Teacher, parent & admin dashboards

’13

fig. 1 — three products, one brief: severe constraints

System prompt · audio only

"Please enter your telephone banking PIN."

✕ users entered their phone number

✓ word order fixed it — PIN first

fig. 2 — standard bank IVR: phrasing is architecture

6people · Experience Design & Technology

Mumbai

Bangalore · opened during COVID

90+ product initiatives · healthcare, fintech, retail, enterprise

fig. 3 — the minimalist: building the practice, 2018–22

ICU · Bed 07LIVE FEED

Protocol update cycle 6 months

Care plan recommendation · synthesised from all three Sepsis pathway v12 applies — lactate trend + MAP. Review suggested orders.

fig. 4 — one patient, four data streams, three products deliberating

Rohan

Run tonight's audit batch and draft the index update.

⚙ run_workflow · public-audit × 12 sites · principle scores → supabase

Publish 12 new index entries to agentability.io? ApproveEdit

Agent · handback

Done — 12 audits scored, index rebuilt, 2 articles drafted for review. Nothing published without you.

agentability.ioicuboid studiobaepradyrihanacharacter arenacharacter clonerdaily digestcontent engine

fig. 5 — the laboratory: 9 systems, live, self-hosted