The consultancy your competition shouldn't know about.
Overview
What Exaptation does
Exaptation is an anthro-complexity consultancy for organisations working in conditions where predictability has stopped paying off.
Services
- SenseMaker™ engagement design: The research most organisations skip because it surfaces what they'd rather not know.
- Design System Scaffolding: When your visual identity needs to live in more places than your design team can hand-hold.
- Local AI: On-premise hardware plus standardised inference interfaces. Private AI that never has to leave your building.
Case studies
- Connecting a design system to the people who would build with it: Designers and engineers stopped working from different copies of the same idea, and the system became the actual contract between them.
- A design language that survived 30 development teams: More than 30 development teams ended up using the system as the default starting point, not because they were told to, but because it had become the easier path.
- Reading a school as one map, not one conversation at a time: The school leadership stopped triaging individual conversations one at a time and started reading the school as a whole, with parents’ and pupils’ accounts sitting side by side in the same map.
- Reaching a market that lives after the purchase: About 300 crafters described what actually happened after the ingredients arrived. New patterns came to the surface, and hypotheses the team had held for years finally had the qualitative and quantitative material behind them.
Contact
Email exaptationrequest.renewed571@passinbox.com. Address: Osterbrooksweg 35-41, 22869 Schenefeld, Germany.
Selected work
Case studies
- Fielmann
Connecting a design system to the people who would build with it
Designers and engineers stopped working from different copies of the same idea, and the system became the actual contract between them.
- Xing
A design language that survived 30 development teams
More than 30 development teams ended up using the system as the default starting point, not because they were told to, but because it had become the easier path.
-
Reading a school as one map, not one conversation at a time
The school leadership stopped triaging individual conversations one at a time and started reading the school as a whole, with parents’ and pupils’ accounts sitting side by side in the same map.
- CandleScience
Reaching a market that lives after the purchase
About 300 crafters described what actually happened after the ingredients arrived. New patterns came to the surface, and hypotheses the team had held for years finally had the qualitative and quantitative material behind them.
Worked with
Clients & partners
What does the term Exaptation actually mean?
In evolutionary biology, an exaptation is a trait that evolved for one purpose and ended up serving a different one. Feathers warmed birds long before they flew, swim bladders became lungs, jaw bones became ear bones.
The shift was rarely planned. It tended to happen when an existing capability landed in a new context where it suddenly mattered more than the one it had been shaped for. We look for the same thing in organisations: the unframed use of what is already there.