APEX OS · Alexander Frings · Español

Alexander Frings: design, engineering and AI

Alexander Frings is a Design Engineer with an MSc in Innovation and Design and an AI researcher at CRTIC, pronounced "critic": the Center for Technological Revolution in Creative Industries. Based in Santiago, Chile.

A designer who thinks with technology. Native Spanish. Fluent English. Japanese N5.

APEX OS is the portfolio in the shape of an operating system: design, engineering and AI. Explore the work as if it were a computer.

Featured projects

  • Romeo & Juliet Flowers: Teatro Municipal (2025): Interactive wall at the Teatro Municipal de Santiago for the Clásica No Convencional gala. A laser tracker detects the visitor's silhouette and transforms it in real time with generative AI into a field of flowers, the visual metaphor for Romeo and Juliet, performed that evening in ballet and orchestra.
  • StarMatch: Networking Data Art (2025): Data art and B2B networking installation designed for events. It transforms the attendee list into an interactive 3D galaxy: each person is a star. When someone activates theirs, the installation shows them in real time their top 3 matches at the event, looking for real complementarity (founder with investor) rather than same-sector similarity. Three versions of one product: the installation (Fintech 2026, 3,045 attendees), the tool in the attendee's phone (SmartCity Expo, 6,350 people, in production) and the version that complies with Chile's personal-data law 21.719, in design.
  • Smart Expense Agent (2024): AI agent connected to WhatsApp to receive and process photos of financial documents. Computer vision + NLP to extract data, detect anomalies and structure into a corporate database.
  • Metamorphosis (2024): Generative art installation for the CRTIC Lab. A digital mirror that transforms the visitor's identity into permanent mutation, exploring the paradox between persistence and change. Real-time open source generative AI.

All projects by Alexander Frings

  • ActiveUnlock: Exergaming (2026, Applied AI): CRTIC research and prototype on body-tracked physical play to increase active breaks at work. Using MediaPipe as the computer-vision engine, it proposes a background app that, with a couple of…
  • CRTIC-Chat (2026, Applied AI): CRTIC's own conversational assistant built on nanochat, Andrej Karpathy's small open language model. It is fine-tuned on a synthetic dataset that represents the centre's identity (culture, tone…
  • Digital Signage with Audience AI (2026, Applied AI): Digital signage that reacts to who is looking at it. On the screen's own hardware, a vision model estimates presence, attention (where the person is looking) and audience profile, and a rules engine…
  • La Vega: An Isometric Map of the Market (2026, Software and tools): Santiago's Mercado La Vega Central as an interactive isometric map: you fly over it, click a stall and get its name, trade, typical produce and hours. The 555 stalls are generated procedurally and…
  • Oráculo: A Digital Twin of Chile (2026, Applied AI): A multi-agent simulation engine to support decisions at CRTIC. From real Chilean signals it builds a knowledge graph, generates dozens of synthetic people and has them debate in a social simulation…
  • PortugalEdge: Live Detection by Distillation (2026, Applied AI): Detect, live and at over 30 frames per second, only the Portugal players in a match. A large vision-language model, slow but able to understand “the ones in red shirts”, acts as the teacher: it…
  • VOLT.EXIF (2026, Software and tools): A mobile app for photographers: it reads a photo's EXIF metadata (camera, lens, aperture, shutter, ISO), applies filters with character and composes the image with that data in a frame, ready to…
  • Perforated Wood Structure (2024, Computational design and digital fabrication): Architectural membrane that modulates light through computationally generated perforation patterns. Algorithmic optimization for structural lightness and aesthetic complexity.
  • Gus: AI Brand Assistant (2024, Applied AI): A platform of AI agents for the food business, born as a thesis for UAI's MSc in Innovation and Design. n8n automation for small owners: it manages the brand identity (palette, logo, references) and…
  • 3D Modular Structure (2023, Computational design and digital fabrication): A construction system where no panel is the protagonist: architecture emerges from assembly. An exploration of how the repetition of a simple unit generates spatial complexity, documented as pure…
  • Parametric Spatial Mapping (2023, Computational design and digital fabrication): Color as data. Data as geometry. A translation exercise where spatial information (density, flow, temperature) becomes built volume. The form isn't decorative: it's the direct consequence of what…
  • Parametric Tree Table (2023, Computational design and digital fabrication): Nature doesn't design in straight lines. This table was born from a concrete purpose: making the inorganic look organic. The base was algorithmically generated from how a tree distributes its load…

Services: workshops, consulting and development

I am a designer, not a programmer. But to me, designing means solving a problem using the best possible tool, and these are things I have already built, and that work today elsewhere.

  • AI for innovation (Workshop): Teams and organisations that want to create new solutions (apps, websites, services) and do not know where to start.
  • Automations and agents (Build): Teams with repetitive processes: expense reports, documents, queries, customer care.
  • Websites that rank (Build): Anyone who needs a website that shows up on Google and is worth sharing.
  • Custom software and apps (Build): A need that no existing tool covers well.
  • Operations and data flows (Consulting): Teams that want to put order into how they work: processes, information, tools.

Contact Alexander Frings

For work, academia or community.