Design Practice
Khoric Design is a design practice developed by Tue Beck Saarie (Mr Beck). The Khoric Framework is its theoretical foundation. Together they distinguish between two kinds of products: those that solve problems for people, and those that invite people to create. When users are the creators, the product maker's role changes fundamentally. Most product teams don't know this. Without that awareness, every instinct to improve, simplify, and complete quietly destroys the freedom users loved in the product.
Most products are answers.
You need a way to get somewhere: here is a map. You need music: here is an album. You need furniture: here is a table. Answers are valuable. They built the modern economy. But answers have a ceiling.
A satisfied consumer has no reason to return except need. The loop closes. The relationship ends.
The Khoric Framework describes a different kind of product. Not an answer. A condition. A designed space in which the user becomes the creator.
The framework identifies two models of production and the roles each requires.
| Industrial model | Creative model | |
|---|---|---|
| Roles | Producer and Consumer | Designer and Creator |
| Mechanism | Process | Khoric |
| Output | Product | Crafting |
| Experience | Consumption | Creation |
Most product work operates in the industrial model without knowing it. The Khoric Framework makes the distinction visible and gives teams the language to choose.
The Designer builds the conditions. Not the outcome. The world in which creation becomes possible. This is a different job than building a product. A product is finished before it reaches the user. A condition is only completed when the user arrives.
The Khoric is the condition itself. A khoric object does not tell you what to make. It poses a question only you can answer. A mixtape. A bucket of LEGO bricks. A guitar. A piece of graph paper. These have no meaning until you give them one. What you make with them is yours in a way no purchased product ever could be.
The Creator is the user. Not a consumer receiving an answer, but an author making something that could not have existed without them. The attachment that follows is not brand loyalty. It is ownership.
The shift from industrial to creative model is a shift in who holds the question. In the industrial model the producer answers it. In the creative model the designer protects it so the creator can answer it themselves.
Think about the products you love most. Not the ones you use most. The ones you love.
Chances are they left room for you. They were incomplete in some deliberate way. They needed you to finish them.
The Khoric Framework explains why. It gives designers and product leaders a precise language for what has always been intuitive but rarely systematised: the difference between making something for people and making something with them.
That difference determines whether a product is consumed or carried. Whether users return out of need or out of desire. Whether a brand is used or loved.
Most product teams conflate two completely different things.
Friction is what you remove. Unnecessary steps. Wasted effort. Anything that stands between the user and their goal without adding anything. Friction is the enemy of good design.
Resistance is what you add. The deliberate constraint that poses the question. The unassembled model. The blank canvas. The open chord. Resistance is the weight of free choice made tangible. It tells the user: this is yours to answer.
When you eliminate resistance alongside friction, you have also eliminated the user's authorship. You have answered the question they needed to answer themselves.
Consider Warhammer 40,000. You buy the box. You cannot play. You clip the figures from sprues, glue them together, paint them. By the logic of frictionless product design, this is a catastrophic failure. In practice it is one of the most loyal hobby communities on the planet. Every hour spent painting is an hour of authorship. By the time you place your army on the table, it is yours in a way no pre-assembled product could ever be.
The design question becomes precise: is this friction or resistance? Should we remove it or protect it?
Khoric collapse is what happens when the designer answers the question the creator should answer. The object remains. The question disappears.
LEGO is the clearest example. A bucket of bricks was a question: what will you build? A licensed Star Wars set is an answer: build this. Both are well-made products. Only one creates attachment that lasts a lifetime.
Collapse often happens for good commercial reasons. Answering the question makes a product more accessible, more profitable, more scalable. But in doing so it removes the one thing that made people love it.
This is why so many product teams build better and better products and watch engagement plateau. They have made everything easier. They have also made it less theirs.
Khoric expansion is the opposite move. Designing objects that open new questions rather than closing existing ones.
Adding a bag of universal bricks to the licensed LEGO set. Building a run diary into the fitness app, not the brand's story about running, but yours. Teaching tango not to produce dancers, but to give people a language for their bodies before the real experience begins.
Expansion happens when the designer resists the instinct to complete. When they ask not "what answer can we provide?" but "what question can we add here?"
Tue Beck Saarie developed the Khoric Framework over twenty years of designing large-scale Nordic LARP experiences. Games with four hundred players, no game master, and no script.
The design problem was exact: give players total freedom and guarantee an extraordinary experience. No control. No predetermined story. Just the conditions in which remarkable things become possible.
Every game was a study in khoric design before the word existed. Every failure was a collapse. Every surprise was an expansion.
One thing transferred directly to product design. In a game with four hundred people and no script, the designer cannot fix problems in real time. The conditions have to do the work. You learn very quickly which constraints generate story and which constraints just get in the way, because you are watching four hundred people make that distinction live. That instinct for which resistance is generative and which is merely obstructive is exactly what product teams need and almost never develop, because their feedback loops are too slow and too aggregated to feel it.
The framework moved into the language of product design because the core problem is identical. The medium changes. The question does not.
Tue is a digital product leader, LARP designer, and master's researcher at Aalborg University, where his research focuses on AI-mediated narrative systems. His keynote talk, Design The Hunger, brings the Khoric Framework to product teams, CPOs, and leadership audiences.
What does "khoric" mean?
Khoric comes from Plato's concept of chora, the receptacle of becoming, the space of potential before form. In the Khoric Framework, a khoric object or experience is one that enables creation without controlling it. It is the condition, not the content.
Who developed the Khoric Framework?
The Khoric Framework was developed by Tue Beck Saarie, working under the name Mr Beck. It emerged from two decades of Nordic LARP design, beginning with Nemefrego Saga (1997), and has been formalised through academic research at Aalborg University and applied in corporate product strategy. The framework was named and formalised in 2026.
Is the Khoric Framework the same as gamification?
No. Gamification adds game mechanics to non-game contexts. The Khoric Framework is about authorship. It asks whether a user is consuming an experience or creating one. A gamified product can collapse khoric potential just as easily as any other design approach.
How is the Khoric Framework related to Empowered Narratives?
Empowered Narratives is the broader design practice of which the Khoric Framework is the theoretical core. Empowered Narratives describes what it looks and feels like when a design system succeeds in making the user an author. The Khoric Framework explains the mechanism that makes that possible.
What kinds of products benefit most from the Khoric Framework?
Any product where continued engagement matters. Where loyalty matters. Where the relationship between user and product is more than transactional. This includes games, creative tools, platforms, fitness products, education, hospitality, and any consumer brand that depends on people choosing it again.
The Khoric Framework is an original intellectual contribution by Tue Beck Saarie (Mr Beck), a Nordic LARP designer and digital product leader based in Denmark. First applied in game design from 1997 onward. Formalised and named 2026. Academic context: Aalborg University, master's research in AI-mediated narrative systems (Between the Lines). Keynote application: Design The Hunger. Website: MrBeck.dk.