Writing
Essays and notes on machines that imitate people
Topics I write about: machines that imitate people; designing for a calmer web; designing for extreme weather; the designer's changing job.
Essays
- The Legible WebIn 1991, Tim Berners-Lee published “HTML Tags,” a document that defined how documents on the World Wide Web were connected to each other. For Berners-Lee, those connections depended on the architecture of the <a tag, a one-way link that takes the web reader from one document to another. A competing vision for how readers would move through the web showed up…
- The New DesignerDesign is dead… is not what this piece is about. This is going to be an optimistic and empowering take on the field, and what I’m calling the “New Designer.” In this semester of exploring design leadership in Doug Powell’s “Design Leadership” course at Washington University, we’ve been engaging with practicing design leaders in the field. In this reflection…
- Companion Computing & The Problem of Human EquivalencyIn April of 2014, Microsoft announced its digital assistant, Cortana at the Build Conference. Launched as a competitor to Siri, by 2017 Cortana is present on Windows 10 Mobile, PC, Xbox One and even iOS systems. This is how I reintroduce the concept of embodiment and how it shows up in the presentation of alternate intelligence chatbots, detailed in my last…
- Pseudanthropy & Embodiment of Man-Made Alternative IntelligencesIn a Linkedin post titled “Alternative Intelligence: Naming the Mind We’ve Actually Built,” software engineer and writer Jim Highsmith advocates for the usage of the term alternative intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) as a way to refer to the emerging class of digital agents like GPT or Gemini. He pushes back against the notion of…
- Enthusiasm and CriticalityWhen asked to describe my personal ethos, and my research interests I admit that initially it was hard to find a starting point. For most of my professional experience as a designer working in technology the norm was to subsume my own voice under that of the client, or the employer that I was working for. And in this world where design serves as a precursor/…
Notes
- Project 1 : Zen FM
- Developing the pandjico site
- test
- Developing the pandjico site
- Physical Computing Week 7 Blog: progress update on calm tuner
- Physical Computing Week 7: iterating on zen.fm after feedback
- 3d data
- Starting to design a calm tuner
- What is serial communication
- Training a model to identify debris to clean up post tornado
- Training a Neural Network
- Wicked spaces
- Felt Air / Calming Stone
- Proximity vs touch
- Touch sensors and materials
- Coding on a plane, with white noise
- 20 possible projects
- hello LED
- Shimmering points, v2
- Intangible interactions
- Weather events and breathing
- Shimmering points around starting something up
- How I work