Koher builds for people who do not control their own work. Look closely and that turns out to be most people who work, and a designer meets it in the first job.
Asked to Be a Machine named the people Koher builds for by their jobs: a registrar, an accounts clerk, an admissions desk, a radiographer. What they share is not the job. The rule they work to was written somewhere else, and their part is to apply it. This position follows that condition past the job titles.
Control is a question of who decides
Research on work calls it decision latitude: how much a person gets to decide about what their work is and how it is done. Almost every job has some. Almost none has all of it.
A delivery rider accepts a route the app offers. A school teacher follows a syllabus and an exam pattern set by the board. A junior designer works to a brief that arrived with the client. A senior designer sets a direction inside a budget somebody else approved. Each decides something. What none of them decides is what the work is for.
The decisions sit on the frames. The person at the centre does the work and decides least about what it is for.
Almost everyone
The surveys that ask about this point the same way. In Britain, the share of employees who said they had a great deal or quite a lot of say over how their work is organised fell from 36% in 2001 to 27% in 2012 (Inanc and colleagues, Skills and Employment Survey, 2013). Across Europe, the 2024 Working Conditions Survey found skills use and training improving, alongside "a decrease in workers' ability to influence collective work processes and apply their own ideas" (Eurofound, 2026).
Employees reporting a great deal or quite a lot of say over work organisation. Inanc, Felstead, Gallie and Green, Job Control in Britain, 2013. Bar heights to scale.
Having a senior title does not settle it either. Among employees in the United Kingdom, managers report the most autonomy, and professionals report substantially less (Wheatley, 2017). Comparing seven countries, Dobbin and Boychuk found autonomy low wherever work is organised around rules rather than around skill (1999). In India, NITI Aayog estimated 77 lakh gig workers in 2020–21, working outside the usual arrangement between an employer and an employee, and expected 2.35 crore by 2029–30 (2022).
So the phrase Koher uses for its people names a condition, not a job title. The condition is common. A registrar has far less room than a senior designer. The condition measures how much of the work arrives already decided. For most people who work, that is most of it.
Drawn to show a shape, not measured. The red part grows with seniority and stays the smaller part.
A designer meets it in the first job
Design education teaches authorship. A student writes the brief, chooses a direction, defends it, and is assessed on those choices. The first job then hands over a brief already written. The client decided what it is for, a senior decided the direction, and the fresher produces it.
The research on that transition says the same thing. A study of how industrial designers go from novice to expert describes employers training novices through a series of disciplinary processes in which "the subjectivity of designers is neglected, leading to the suppression of imaginative expression and feelings of alienation" (Wong and colleagues, 2016). Interviewing design professionals in the Netherlands about their early years, van Onselen and colleagues note that after graduation "there may be less room for an expression of personal values" (2022). And among young industrial designers in Turkey who chose freelancing for its independence, Kaygan and Demir found that it normalised low-paid, insecure work by "creating the illusion of being 'free' to accept these conditions" (2017).
The same person, trained to decide first, starting work in a frame where the deciding was done before they arrived.
Koher's earlier tools were built for design students. Those students go on to first jobs, and the first job is where they find out how little is left for them to decide. A registrar has been in that position all along. Koher builds for the registrar and the designer alike.
The art world is not an exception
The art world sells authorship, and it runs on the same arrangement. Studios with assistants are an old and ordinary way of making art, and most of what follows is in the words of the people involved. Damien Hirst told the Los Angeles Times in 2011 that after painting five of his spot paintings himself, "as soon as I sold one, I got assistants to do them." The assistants chose and applied the colours, under his rule that no colour repeat on a canvas, and he told the Observer in 2012: "Getting other people to make decisions is a good way to not make decisions."
A former painting assistant in Jeff Koons's studio, John Powers, described the job in 2012 as "Paint by numbers," with "no visible brush strokes, no blending, no mistakes." The studio employed more than 100 painters in 2015. Artnet News reported about 30 laid off in 2017, some after more than a decade in the studio, and by 2019 the painting department was down to between six and ten people as the studio moved towards automated production.
Painting staff in Jeff Koons's studio, as reported by Artnet News in 2017 and 2019. Bar heights to scale; the 2019 bar is drawn at eight.
That is the sequence Asked to Be a Machine describes: a person asked to work like a machine, and then a machine. And the artist whose name is on the work does not control its price either. Dealers, auction houses and critics set that, and reputation is theirs to confer, not the artist's to claim (Beckert and Rössel, 2013).
Not a niche
So Koher does not build for a niche. A radiographer is in this condition, and so are a registrar, a delivery rider, a school teacher, a painting assistant in an artist's studio and a designer in a first job. Koher's tools are made for the condition wherever it turns up, and are not reserved for one occupation inside it.
What does not change
Nobody's work becomes theirs to change because the condition is common. The brief still arrives with the client, and the register still has to balance. What Koher supplies is a few minutes of fun beside the task, never inside the decision, lasting as long as the tool does.
Most people who work do not decide what the work is for. Koher starts from that, and leaves the decision where it already sits.