Tanuj

The most overlooked sensation in product design may be haptics—the physical vibrations you feel. While sounds are easily thwarted by the mute switch, haptics can play in any environment. It’s like sound for touch. And just like sound, haptics can be designed.

Disruptive innovations have weird metabolisms. They have a cost structure and product-market fit that are alien—even toxic—to incumbents, like blue-green algae eating sunlight and generating oxygen. Incumbent companies can’t adapt to it. It’s not in their DNA.

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like "this" [a journey] instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be.

I’ve come to think of the networks and infrastructures connected to the phone as active parties in the photographic process. I take pictures of the non-computational world and I give them to the phone so it can understand my world better. The phone’s understanding is extractive, not empathic, but it’s the tradeoff I accept in order to store and... See more

Cosmic vertigo is how it feels to be overcome by all that is beyond the earth. But we forget about all that it means so quickly. We are stardust and the cosmos is our mother.

For the people who’ve figured out the right incantations to type and buttons-buried-in-submenus to click, computers can automate administrivia, surface information, and make them feel “more fully participant in the future”. But getting there is an arduous journey, and many people get in a place where computers just make things harder. The... See more

This brings me to a problem that we've been noodling on for several years, and to my mind, it still a critical open question. So when you're trying to build these end-user extensible, digital document systems, there's a few desiderata that you want: You want to be very fast. You want to be safe, in the sense of, end users aren't going to be... See more

But size is not the most troubling concept we have to deal with. It's time, or, more precisely, the time we have. If you're lucky enough to live to one hundred, you have five thousand two hundred weeks at your disposal.