Yevhen Shapovalov

Architectural visualization and branding. Interfaces, interiors, small games. Environments not only on a screen, but in real life: park areas, public and commercial spaces, private homes. And a chapter of teaching along the way.

In every one of those fields, I kept running into the same thing: people understand an author's intention differently from how it was meant.

And it's far wider than design. It starts with the most ordinary things — how to use a cup, a lock, a door handle — runs through children's toys, and ends in production lines and technical processes. Everywhere, there is a distance between what the author put in and what the people who meet it actually understand.

For more than fifteen years, I've been developing my own model of how people coordinate around shared meaning — and why they so often don't. I applied it in industry, at a processing plant where complex operations had to be made clear to the people running them. In 2020, I published an article arguing that complex systems need deliberate methods of ordering, not more rules.

I could see the problem clearly. What I couldn't see yet was a way to solve it at scale.

Then circumstances beyond my control brought me to the Netherlands. No language, no local track record — but thirty years of expertise and a way of seeing systems that doesn't depend on any one country.

So I started from the ground: learning Dutch, going to interviews, talking to people across industries. Those conversations showed me where my knowledge was needed most — in fast-moving environments where people with different languages and different experience have to act as one.

AI changed what's possible. Problems I had been able to describe for years suddenly became solvable. In 2023, I conceived Gezelex as a project and began building it: writing, sketching, and modelling the method — how to build the picture people need before they have to act.

All my separate, very different experiences turned out to circle one question: the distance between intention and reality.

With the project already underway, I started working on the operational floor of logistics. What I had described in theory, I now saw every day in practice.

The system works. But it works at a cost to the people inside it: the same confusion repeating, the same explanations given again and again, knowledge leaving with every person who moves on. Things run despite this, not because of it.

For most of history, that gap between intention and understanding was an inconvenience. A misread handle, a confusing form. But as work and daily life become more automated and more technologically dense, the same gap becomes critical — and unsafe.

Closing it takes design, systems thinking, and real knowledge of the floor. I happen to bring all three — and I intend to put them to work.