Rick Rubin
Design Code
Taste is a discipline. This is the manual.
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Rashmi Narendra is the founder of Half Human Half Machine, a Manhattan studio that makes brands legible to people and machines at once.
Before founding HH/HM, she was a trend forecaster—reading cultural signals before they surfaced. The signal she is reading now: search is becoming conversational, and most brands are invisible inside it.
In May 2026, Google called its new AI-powered Search box its biggest upgrade in more than 25 years. Search is becoming a continuous conversation: interpreting intent, retaining context across follow-up questions, and moving toward agents that can research and act on a user’s behalf.
HH/HM answers that shift with Contextual Intelligence Mapping™ and Brand OS: Culture Code, Design Code, and Systems Code. The human read and the machine layer, built together.
“Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world.”
“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.”
“Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that’s how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories.”
Books we read, return to, and quote.
Rick Rubin
Design Code
Taste is a discipline. This is the manual.
Daniel Kahneman
Culture Code
Every buying decision is made twice. Once by instinct, once by the story we tell about it.
Edward Bernays
Culture Code
The man who invented public relations, in his own words. Uncomfortable, and required.
Carl Jung
Culture Code
The unconscious speaks in images before the conscious mind gives them language. Meaning begins in the unseen.
Al Ries & Jack Trout
Culture Code
Written in 1981. Still the sharpest explanation of why brands live in the mind, not the market.
Robert Cialdini
Culture Code
The persuasion playbook. Read it to use it. Read it again to defend against it.