Flo Lenormand - Flo Bureau of Investigation, the Prospectus
Welcome
I’m Flo, product designer at Meta. Welcome to my bureau of investigation, where I write about design and file my experiments. I spent six years on messaging at Meta, first keeping conversations safe on Instagram, then making them expressive on Messenger. Now I design AI because it matters, and because it’s fun.
002 Articles
Everything I publish is filed here, newest first: case studies from the field, essays on design and AI, notes from a decade of practice.
003 Exhibits
Not everything the bureau produces is written. These are the working records: instruments you can play, prototypes that shipped, figures retired with honors.
004 About
About me
Best advice I received during my career: put the design where it’s not expected.
I started by taking it literally: I wrote a letter to the French president asking for an internship in design. It worked in a way I didn’t expect and got me into the Cour des comptes, a two-hundred-year-old French institution where I was the only designer in the building. That experience taught me that design can carry real civic weight.
I moved to San Francisco and joined SpotAngels, a small startup building a live parking map. Apple awarded it New App We Love, Google Play called it Best Hidden Gem. I also worked at Withings, designing connected health products. Then I joined Meta, and I’ve been there since.
At Meta I spent six years on messaging. On Instagram Direct, I worked on safety and privacy at the scale of a billion private conversations. On Messenger, I designed media, inbox and everything that makes the app more expressive. Safety taught me responsibility. Expression taught me play.
Now I design AI at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. It’s the most exciting work I’ve done in years. It’s the first time the fun and the responsibility merged into one team. Every feature carries real weight, the craft matters, and I’m in the room where the important decisions are made about AI. For once, it’s also the room where I get to play.
I write about all of this. I’ve been publishing since 2016, first about design and democracy, then about craft and process, now about what design and AI means.
I lived in Biarritz for the last three years, in the French Basque Country. I’m moving back to San Francisco in August 2026. I surf, I hike, I camp. Any outdoor activity that doesn’t require screen time. I’m slowly rebuilding this site.
Work on what matters, and don’t forget to have fun.