Foundations: enrolling now. Self-paced. $299. Join the list.

The tools get faster. The work gets flatter. The person disappears.

Joinery teaches one methodology for keeping your work yours.

A designer runs AI on a brief and the output covers everything but goes deep on nothing. A Shopify merchant launches a store and the template makes handcrafted product look mass-market. A writer uses AI to draft and the prose comes back competent, smooth, and completely absent of their voice. A design lead watches the system drift over three years of decisions that all made sense individually. Different practitioners, different tools, the same structural problem: the system filled the gaps with its own defaults because nobody designed around how it actually works.

More instructions, more templates, more editing after the fact. None of it fixes the problem because the problem starts before production begins. The input was shaped wrong for the system receiving it.

Joinery teaches you to read what the system actually needs and design your input to match. The methodology is called Accommodation Design. It comes from special education pedagogy, where designing around how the student actually processes is federal law. The same methodology applies to AI tools, eCommerce platforms, the blank page, and design systems that need to hold across contributors and years of decisions.

Same methodology. Pick what you practice.

Each offering is standalone. No prerequisites. Three self-paced modules. You work on your own real project.

Foundations For creative practitioners using AI. Break compound prompts into specialists. Keep your raw thinking in the work. Build voice rules that hold during generation. Self-paced · 3 modules $299 Enrolling
Brand Governance for Shopify For store owners and brand operators. Audit your store layer by layer. Surface what the founder knows that the template hides. Build voice rules that hold across every page. Self-paced · 3 modules Pricing TBD Coming soon
Writing For fiction and nonfiction writers. Decompose narrative into structural layers. Let raw material lead before imposing structure. Build voice governance that keeps you in the prose. Self-paced · 3 modules Pricing TBD Coming soon
Design Thinking & Systems For designers and design leads. Your system drifted and nobody caught it. Learn to audit the layers independently, read what the platform actually needs, and build governance that holds across contributors and years. Self-paced · 3 modules Pricing TBD Coming soon
See all offerings

What every offering teaches

Three structural moves, applied to your domain:

Break compound work into parts A compound task splits attention across everything at once. Decompose it into single-objective steps and each one gets real depth. The synthesis is where your judgment becomes the product.
Keep raw thinking in the work Structured input compresses what makes your thinking yours. Start with the raw version. The false starts, the contradictions, the rough edges. Let the structure come from the material.
Build rules that hold your voice Your voice lives in how you actually talk, not in style guides written after the fact. Extract the patterns from real conversation. Load them before production begins. The output sounds like you because the defaults had nowhere to go.

Joinery was founded by Peter Salvato, a design engineer who spent twenty-five years reading rooms: construction sites, classrooms, enterprise platforms, kitchens, printshops, a novel. In a special education classroom in Brooklyn, he learned that designing around how the student actually processes is federal law. He applied the same methodology to AI systems, to a Shopify jewelry brand, and to fiction writing. Six published papers with DOIs document the approach. The courses teach it.

Research

Six published papers with DOIs. Open-access cognitive science grounding the methodology.

See the papers →
Origins

Federal law requires designing around how each student actually learns. That classroom is where this methodology started.

Read the paper →
Practice

SVA-trained. Taught special education in Brooklyn. Taught graphic design at Kingsborough. Thirteen years as design engineering lead.

About the founder →

Foundations

$299. Three self-paced modules of applied practice on your own real project, with open office hours and personal review from the founder.

See the full course or browse all offerings.

Free essay

The Wrong Question

Why your prompts keep getting longer and your output keeps getting worse. The problem starts before the prompt.