Hello, I'm Erika.
Hi. I'm Erika Flowers. I have been designing things for people for my entire life: service design, UX, systems thinking, organizational transformation. I have done it at startups, at agencies, at federal agencies, and at NASA. And for most of those years, I have been fighting the same gap.
The gap between what I could see in my head and what actually got built. The handoff. The translation layer. The "that's not what I meant" moment in sprint review. Every designer knows it. I spent three decades trying to close it. Zero-Vector is what happened when I finally did.
First Digital Service Expert recruited. GS-14 IT Specialist. Member of the CIO and CAIO. Author of NASA AI Readiness Strategy whitepaper.
7 years leading design at Intuit for the QuickBooks ecosystem. Sr. Principal Strategist at hypergrowth scale-up Mural. Speaker, author, and consultant to the Fortune 500.
Published author, inventor of the Practical Service Blueprint, science-fiction writer, accomplished punk-rock drummer.
The AI Journey
In 2022, I started experimenting with AI tools at Mural. In 2023, I founded NASA's AI Innovation Team. By 2024, I was building real applications with AI agents, not demos, not prototypes, real software that real people use.
The moment it clicked: I was building Fictioneer, an AI-powered story development platform for my own 400,000-word science fiction series. I needed it. It did not exist. So I built it. With AI agents as crew. The entire thing, API, database, RAG pipeline, prose engine, frontend, built by one person directing a team of AI agents.
That was the proof. Not that AI could write code. That a designer with thirty-one years of systems thinking, craft, and taste could direct AI agents to build exactly what she envisioned. No handoff. No translation. No "that's not what I meant." The doctrine wrote itself.
The Redefinition
I have done this before. I helped define service design practice when it was still called "service blueprinting" and nobody knew what it was. I built the community, wrote the guides, gave the talks. Then UX design needed the same treatment. Then design operations. Each time, the industry needed someone to name the thing, frame it, and show people how to do it.
Zero-Vector is the next redefinition. The tools changed. The gap closed. The role of the designer transformed from someone who draws pictures of things into someone who builds the thing directly. This is not a small adjustment. It is a paradigm shift, and it needs someone who has been through paradigm shifts before to help people navigate it.
My ethos has always been the same: take from all that which is around you and make of it something more. Systems thinking from Deming. Narrative design from Campbell and McKee. Lean principles from Ries. Blue ocean strategy from Kim and Mauborgne. Quality philosophy from Taguchi. Zero-Vector is the synthesis, everything I have learned in thirty-one years applied to the most significant shift in how things get made since the personal computer.
The Author
I am also a published science fiction author. The Dauntless Gambit series, over 400,000 words of space opera, is where the crew that builds Zero-Vector gets their names. Julian, Siddig, Decker, Lee, Sellivan, Qin. They were characters first. Now they are agents. The fiction became the framework.
What Comes Next
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