Meet the founders
The people behind Afidot, the longer version.
Afi Barati
The artist.
I'm Afi, a UX/product designer, painter, and sculptor. I picked up a brush as a child; by seven I was in formal painting classes, and I spent my summers between the easel and the sculpting studio. I dreamed of studying sculpture, even in Italy, but the realities of the time steered me toward graphic design, and I kept sculpting as my truest pursuit alongside it.
Before moving to the US, I designed and built more than ten public sculptures for my city in Iran. They still stand there today, and people still stop to photograph them. In the years since, I've become a staff product designer, untangling complex UX problems and shaping workflows for some of the largest media and telecom companies in the US. My work makes the same case every day: design that starts from real human needs, and technology, including AI, that serves the people who use it, never the other way around.
For me, the disciplines were never separate. A sculpture in a public square, a product used by millions, an object in your home. Clay, iron, or my fingers on a keyboard. The question is always the same: does it serve the person it was made for? Creativity has no edges.
I don't make art for collectors. I make art worth collecting, for people, for the city, for everyone.
Amir Ashtiani
The architect.
I'm Amir, an architect and computational designer who grew up inside the discipline. Like Afi, I come from a family rooted in architecture and construction. I'm a designer as much as an engineer: I've worked on homes, high-rise towers, and forward-looking developments from Manhattan to NEOM in Saudi Arabia. I'm also a researcher in AI-driven architecture, building the computational workflows that let ambitious forms be designed and made at scale, much of that work carrying a deep environmental conscience.
I also teach at Pratt in New York, and it was there, working with my students, that the thinking reached all the way to the Moon. In a NASA-inspired research project, I explored how humans might one day build in space, sending 3D-printing machines ahead to print full-scale habitats from materials like clay, so shelter would be waiting for astronauts when they arrived. The leap from printing architecture on the Moon to printing an object for your table is smaller than it sounds: it's the same conviction that technology, used well, can put beautiful things within everyone's reach.
How we work together
Today we design as two halves of one process. One of us begins with how a piece should feel; the other, with how it can be made. Afi leads the form and the experience around it: the shape you hold, the way it changes a room. Amir leads the structure and the computational craft that lets a design exist at all. Afidot lives where the two of us meet.