About haana
A small studio.
A considered practice.
haana was born from a simple observation: most organisations have more data than they can process and less understanding of the communities they serve than they think.
We are architects, industrial designers, Fortune 100 AI product managers, native speakers, and systems thinkers — of Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese, and English — who understand the cultures we research from the inside. We combine this first-hand cultural understanding with AI-assisted synthesis to help clients move faster without losing the depth that makes insights actionable. We take on a small number of clients at a time, and we work closely with each one.
How we work
Native, not translated
Our researchers don't translate — they understand. Cultural nuance, tone, and unspoken meaning come from living inside a culture, not from processing text through a model.
Tools serve the method
AI is a tool, not a strategy. We reach for it when it helps and set it aside when the moment calls for human judgement.
Bottom-up
Insights come from people, not dashboards. We start with communities and work upward — AI helps us do that at scale without flattening the signal.
Research as infrastructure
The goal isn't a report. The goal is an organisation that understands its communities well enough to make better decisions continuously.