Floating Life

浮生

A one-person studio. In an age of AI making everything faster and louder, choosing to do less, slower, with more care.

Origin

The studio takes its name from Six Records of a Floating Life (浮生六记), a memoir written around 1808 by 沈复, a minor clerk in late imperial China. Through hardship — debt, exile, the early death of his wife — he kept careful records of the small dignified things: a vase of flowers on his desk, a moonlit boat ride, a bonsai he had been training for years.

Taking the transient, ordinary, drifting life seriously, with aesthetic care. — the studio's compass

How we work

This studio is one person (eventually three to five). Implementation is done with AI as the core method. We choose this approach openly: in 2026, what is scarce is no longer the ability to ship code — it is the taste, the patience, the care to decide what is worth shipping at all.

We use AI the way a literatus used a brush: as a tool that lowers the cost of execution so that more thought can go into what is being made, and for whom.

What we make

Small things. For specific people. Slowly. Our criteria for taking on a project:

It serves a need the efficiency economy has overlooked — people the market does not optimize for. It can be used with dignity, on the user's own pace. It is something we would want to use ourselves, daily, for years. And it will be maintained, not abandoned.

We do not make: attention-extracting products, growth-hacked social tools, anything that treats users as engagement metrics.

Current work

Roana · 漫行

In design

An assistive navigation system for blind and low-vision users. On-device computer vision + bone-conduction speech + wrist haptics.

roana.app github

If you have thoughts to share, or something you'd like us to look at — write to us. We read everything.