Marcia Adair

Strategy + Experiments

Case Studies

Client work: the problems, the approach, and what changed.

Pretty Pony pick screen with choices grouped by strategy

feasibility

Ten first-timers, one app, too many new things

Pretty Pony was meant to help newcomers make their own bets. At the track, the betting was the easy part.

Guerilla Garden home screen with a large microphone button

ai

A garden you can talk to

A spreadsheet of 117 plants became an app that files what is said out loud in the garden: new plants, watering, notes, plants to give away.

Hypocheck receipt showing the Lean wins verdict

feasibility

Pay down the mortgage, or keep the cash invested?

A mortgage calculator that answers the question bank calculators skip: where the next €1,000 does more work.

Dahlias and orange flowers planted around a tree on the traffic island

growth

What happens when a traffic island becomes a garden?

A public planting experiment on Kempener Straße in Nippes, Cologne: an unloved heat sink in the middle of the road, turned into something regenerative for plants and neighbours.

Three screens from the Pretty Pony app: coat colour picker, tapped names, and the four suggested picks

feasibility

Is the pretty one any better than random?

A deliberately silly betting app, 177 races and a dashboard, built to test one hunch properly.

Typewriter view of the writing app with two chapters on the page

ai

Start typing. The structure follows.

Type a chapter heading and the chapter exists. A writing app that builds the book's structure from what is written.