On anima

The name comes from anima — the Latin word for breath, and for the soul: the thing that turns an object into a presence. The same root runs under animate, under animation, under animal. It’s where animism gets its name too — the old idea that objects, places and creatures all carry a spirit of their own.

We’re not animists. We just think the word describes the work.

For most of history, “a thing that seems alive” was a superstition. It isn’t anymore. We’re the first people to fill our homes with objects that watch, listen, and act on their own — and we’ve barely asked what it should feel like to live with them. That’s the odd question the lab follows. Sometimes the object is software. Sometimes it might be a chair. The question doesn’t change: how does a made thing cross the line from something you use to something that seems, somehow, awake — and how do we make that good?

Numa is our first attempt at an answer.