Pixel Posts

Dumb Phones aren't a smart idea to cure smartphone addiction

The premise that if you take away social media apps from people's phones and keep only what's essential for them to get by their day is flawed on multiple levels. There are three ways of curing any addiction: Removal, Substitution, and Habit Change, Removal is the most rudimentary form that

Guest Lecture

UC Berkeley, MDes Guest Lecture: Ethical Software

Guest Lecture at UC Berkeley MDes, where I talk about designing software on principles, and tackling ethical and moral challenges along the way.

thoughts

It's not a coincidence that analog film is making a comeback.

People value imperfections and asymmetry more than they're willing to admit. The human is face is not symmetrical even if it appears to be. That's where our appreciation for assymetry and imperfection begins. But it goes beyond that. Everything natural around us is more often than not asymmetrical, imperfect and

apple

Where I want Apple to go in the next 15 years

Tim Cook’s remarkable run as a CEO is coming to a close at a time when tech itself is undergoing a massive transformation in people’s lives. Here’s how I want tech at Apple to evolve in the next decade and half. And it’s not about AI.

iPod

Young people crave uni-taskers and it's not that deep

The resurgence of the iPod and analogue technology with buttons is not a coincidence. People crave for new experiences.

Artificial Intelligence

Thoughts from a recently concluded AI conference at UC Berkeley

While the conference was a comprehensive mirror to the schism in AI discourse today. I walked back with more questions than answers.

apple

Apple at 50: Why I root for a company's success

Apple's approach to stand up for what they think is right when everyone else is doing something else is both admirable and makes their success feel personal.

design

Tech’s homogeneity is a scale problem

Easier to be creative when there are five of something vs five million of something.

Design Framework

A collection of Design Frameworks for designing emerging technologies

Three design frameworks, that will enable people to design good computing experiences in the future. These are my attempt at cutting through the noise in emerging tech right now.

Emerging Technology

Designing Emerging Technologies in 2026

Emerging tech is not a form-factor problem. In 2026, we need to design emerging technologies that look beyond techno-centric appliances.

Visual Design

The assembly-line-ification of App Icons

Today's app icons look as if they came out of an assembly line. All looking the same, designed for maximum scale, and devoid of any identity or soul. Turning the craft of designing an app icon into a lost art.

product design

Why every "iPhone killer" will fail

Here are three bitter realities that a lot of people who want to figure out what comes after the iPhone fail to see: There's no general purpose computerThere's no Joe Six PackThe iPhone was neither meant to be a general purpose computer nor did it replace the Macintosh.So if

apps

Introducing Shiuli: Images made accessible

Most images online never get an alt-text description. Shiuli aims to change that by making it easy to generate alt-text for images.

accessibility

Solving Liquid Glass' Accessibility issues with more materials

Liquid Glass needs to have tinted glass and frosted glass materials to help make it become more legible and Accessible.

Prototyping

Fake Apps: How to prototype your way through a major redesign

How I redesigned LookUp into smaller, sizable chunks and then strung them together into a main app.

Artificial Intelligence

Not just AI: How LookUp uses Foundation Models responsibly for its Learning tools.

Centered around user needs, LookUp's AI features go above and beyond to make sure that the learning experience for English Learners is accurate and reliable.

lookup

LookUp 12: Discover, Collect, and Learn

A portfolio of LookUp's latest update, the design philosophy behind its redesign and key new features.

Action Centered Design

A short primer on Action-Centered Design

Tools follow action, just like form follows function. Action-Centered Design is a versatile framework that enables designers to design for actions first.

Artificial Intelligence

The Paradox of Context in Computing

Why more context isn’t always the solution for bad contextual computing. This post serves as a primer to contextual computing and offers a framework for designing good contextual experiences.

Artificial Intelligence

Beyond Sparkles and Chat

AI helps best when it stops taking the center-stage

thoughts

The problem with AI hardware is that it’s called AI Hardware

Thoughts on the Jony Ive — Sam Altman partnership, the problem with AI hardware and where I want to see “AI Hardware” go.

Action Centered Design

Bringing Word of the Day by LookUp to Apple TV

How an action-centered-design framework and SwiftUI helped me build the Apple TV app for Word of the Day by LookUp in an afternoon’s worth of work.

lookup

The painstaking effort that goes into crafting LookUp's Word of the Day

Real art takes time, painstaking effort, and perseverance. Generative AI cannot replace the journey. None of LookUp's Words of the Day are AI Generated nor will they ever be.

Distraction Free Computing

Action Centered Design Framework

Full video of my Action Centered Design Framework talk at the ARCtic conference in Oulu; March 2025.

thoughts

Things I learnt in the last three months while job-hunting in the Bay Area

No deep insights here. It's just a collection of things I have discovered and learned.