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Peter Salvato

I’m a design engineer. I studied visual communication at SVA in the nineties, taught a self-contained special education classroom in Brooklyn, taught graphic design at Kingsborough Community College, and spent thirteen years building the front end of an enterprise recruiting platform. The design eye came from school. Systems thinking came from 1,100 deployments across six continents. Accommodation thinking came from twelve IEPs running simultaneously in one room.

Three years ago I started working with AI tools daily and recognized the same structural problems I’d been solving in classrooms and codebases for two decades. The tools flatten your voice. They collapse evaluation into a single score. They lose your thinking between sessions. They demand structured input before you’ve finished having the thought. They replace your judgment with defaults. I built the fix for each one and published the research in six whitepapers.

Now I teach it. Joinery is a school I founded for creative practitioners working with AI. The methodology comes from special education pedagogy, applied to a different kind of processing system. The core question is the same one I learned to ask in a classroom in Sunset Park: what does the system receiving this work actually need to do the job well?

The work. The research. The writing. The school.