This photo was taken exactly three years ago. The brief interaction with Tim Cook was a glimpse into the workings of a CEO. Sharp, quick-witted, percipient and above all, humble and willing to engage in a meaningful conversation even if it’s something he was seeing for the first time.

This is all you expect from a leader. If Steve Jobs made the personal computer cool, Tim Cook ensured it reached millions of people. Over the last 15 years computers have become a ubiquitous entity across the globe, and the success of the iPhone is one of the biggest reasons behind it.

Today’s world however is much different from 1997 or 2011. It’s not an era where people are new to technology or computers. Everyone young grew around it. The novelty of the tech is gone. In fact, the last few years  of the software industry in general have been so trust eroding that people no longer see tech and tech companies with rose tinted glasses.

Ternus is becoming a CEO in an era where tech desperately needs to get out of the way, and take a backstage presence, we’re live in a post-technocentric world, where the problems and solutions are much bigger than what an app can solve. Tech doesn’t need to occupy the center stage, it needs to become the invisible tool that helps us get our things done.

And that’s all I want from Apple in the next decade and half. To fulfil the promise of building tools and technology that step back and help people be better versions of themselves. We don’t need tech that does the work for us, or replaces artistic expression. We need tech that empowers us, augments our thinking.

People forget that today's 20 somethings have not seen the era of Casette tapes, multi-button electronics, iPods, etc. They probably saw the tail-end of that when they were growing up. But it's been mostly touch-screen slabs for them.

Touch Screen slabs, with subscription laden services have practically not changed over the last 15 years.

People want new things, they are nostalgic about the past, and now see the iPod in a new light, it's not "one more device to carry", it's a dedicated device for music.

They also see its benefits. It's not got apps, services, notifications, etc. so they can listen to the music they like in peace. After all, dedicated hardware will always be better at certain things than general purpose hardware. So the iPod is coming back.

This is what happens when you raise a generation on nothing but touch screens. They get tired of them. They see the negatives more clearly than those who invented them.

As for me, the creator of The Unitasker Manifesto, I couldn't be happier. I love the iPod.

About three weeks back I attended UC Berkeley's "Interface to Agency" a single day design conference on Agentic AI and ontological design.

All in all it was an extremely balanced conference that did a decent of job of presenting a myriad of view points on the state of artificial intelligence.

But I came out of the conference with three key insights.

There's a lot of gate-keeping by obfuscation right now

What's the biggest indicator of an insecure industry? Jargon. Where the notion of "This is too complicated for you to understand, let the experts handle it" is prevalent, you know it's an insecure industry that's trying to gate-keep others from joining because they fear that the knowledge they claim to possess would not be considered special anymore, or the money they're minting right now will start to get diluted. And that's exactly how it felt like going through multiple of the talks on Agentic AI that day.

"The job of a human in software design is going to be that of an orchestrator or manager of Agents, that they employ / deploy to get things done for them"

A common theme that I observed during the first half of the conference was this notion that the computer will do work for me, and while it's a noble idea, it's hardly new, or hardly as revolutionary as AI optimists would have you believe. It's just wrapped up in the jargon of Agentic AI.

Truth be told, Agentic AI isn't new. It's just a fancy way of saying "we figured vanilla ChatGPT is a stupid tool for answering your questions so we decided that it needs to hand over performing tasks to different actions that can reliably give correct answers". If Hallucinations are just glorified bugs, Agents are glorified computer programs. For some reason AI people love giving human attributes to a non-living thing.

What's complicated about this? Nothing. It's just that the terminology itself is alienating.

Coming to the other half that of the computer doing work for you. It's literally trying to live the dream of countless automation and voice assistant apps, from Automator, to Shortcuts, to Siri. This idea that I press a button and the computer just does things for me and I don't need to do anything.

Guess what? It's great but only for small, repeatable actions that you don't want control over and it's not a lot of things.

Even socially, we don't want others doing things for us as much as we want to do things together.

If my brother orders a burrito for me by guessing I am hungry, and would need a Burrito, while it may flatter me, there's a high likelihood that I may not want a Burrito at that time, or from that place, or just want a different Burrito from the one he thinks I want. He can't get into my brain and figure these things out, he needs to ask me, what I want. "Interaction" is more important than "Action".

Automator, Shortcuts, IFTTT, aren't the next computing revolution not because the technology is not there yet, it's because the tasks that can be automatically done by the computer for us, are very few and appeal to specific people.

AI has produced the biggest schism in technological discourse.

It's not like the conference didn't put those view points up, it did and to a very good extent. If the first half of the conference made me feel out-intellected, the second half had talks that focused on interaction design, home-grown AI models, and a rollicking roast of the technology by Bruce Sterling.

While the second half was more enjoyable to me, I couldn't help but notice the schism. On one hand we have people who practically live and breathe this "agentic" world and would have you believe that it's the future of computing, on the other hand there are people who want to push back, who don't want AI impacting human creativity, who look down upon it even.

That dichotomy is jarring. In fact even more so, when you see such discordant views amongst people working on the tech itself. To me it's a clear lack of technological and design leadership.

We have the tech, it's controlled by big tech, big tech is controlled by systems of scale and growth, which the initially promised technology is failing to fulfill, and that pushes execs to make pompous, grandiose claims that are far from reality; and that pushes this hyper optimistic buzzword laden narrative of AI being all powerful.

People who are skeptics of big tech sometimes see through the bullshit, sometimes people buy into the fear, uncertainty and doubt that execs are creating because the new tech is intimidating, a lot of people have genuine ethical concerns about it, and some people don't buy into the marketing and see the utility of the technology differently.

But such is the juggernaut of AI growth, that these people are pushed to the other side of the spectrum, creating little room for rational discourse, and only screeching voices that vacillate between  "AI is the future of humanity" and "AI is the worst, most unethical thing  in tech" are left in the room.

Nobody gets AI yet. But everyone wants to have an opinion on it. A vision rooted in understanding of the technology and its ethical implications would've done wonders to the AI discourse. Sadly, that sort of leadership doesn't exist anymore.

There's no transparency in AI.

Every breakthrough technology, gave people the freedom to tinker with it, to look under the hood, shape it, mold it into their own, and learn about its workings by making.

Computers started with hackers tinkering and in computer clubs, they were accessible electronics that people could get into and understand it as much as they could build on top of them. In the early days of web, you could go to a website, view source and understand how things worked, the code was open to be understood.

This is true for computers, but also true for ancient tech like wood, fire, paper, metal.

But with AI, it's mostly only accessible to build on top of the tech developed by tech conglomerates like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Claude. There's no easy way for people to dig into it, understand the workings and tinker with an LLM's inner workings.

While tools to fine tune LLMs exist, they are far less accessible to the common person than the tools to tinker with a computer were in the 1980s. Partly because of the complexities involved in "fine tuning an LLM" and partly because the weights and the reasoning are the secret sauce for these things. And even if you fine tune an LLM, you cannot really get into the weights of the training or tinker with how its reasoning works, so the hobbyists working with AI always have a second hand understanding of the tech.

It's also a technology uniquely controlled by big tech. Every other technological revolution was more open.  

These are lots of words to say that while I appreciate the varied AI discourse presented by the conference, I walked back with more questions than answers.

What are we really building and how is it helping people is a question I walked in with, and walked out with unanswered.

The reason why I've rooted for Apple all these years is the shared values.

Sure, they make great products and they are immensely successful at it, but its their ability to go against the grain, to stand up for what they think is right when everyone else is doing something else, is something I aspire in my own life and work.  Their success feels like an affirmation of my values more than any thing else.

Be it their stance on data privacy, or their recent outlook on AI with their focus on building, and promoting tools that empower human expression rather than replace it, or their focus on Accessibility; more often than not I find myself agreeing with them in principle rather than looking at them as yet another soulless capitalistic enterprise where immediate profits reign supreme.

And this is consistent across every aspect of the company. What's amazed me over the years is how egalitarian they are.

I obviously owe a lot of my career success to Apple, and Apple's products, one thing that's always struck me is how there's literally no difference in how my apps as an indie developer and those of industry stalwarts have been treated.

Apple's prestigious annual design awards end up awarding many indie developers each year too.

As an app maker, being put on the same pedestal as industry giants from day 1 is immensely empowering (and why would it be any other way!?).

Through their actions, Apple makes it clear that they see no difference between indie developers and larger enterprises. Unlike other places where the systems and incentives in place naturally award those with bigger pockets.

Over the years, I've enjoyed using Apple products, agreed and disagreed with their design decisions, held strong opinions on where I'd change things, but ultimately it's shared values that makes me come back to rooting for their successs.

Here’s an experiment. Take 5 unique shapes. They look cool right? Each one stands out on its own has unique characteristics, texture, and color.

We should have more of them. So let's multiply them. Maybe we can add new colours too.

At an even bigger size, the textures are not even clearly noticeable, so let’s remove them.

Let’s make it a little bigger. Actually the colors are making it look incongruous, so let’s have the same color.

Let’s make it even bigger. It’s not very efficient use of space. We can pack way more if everything is a circle.

Great! Now we can scale this to a million units! A million circles of same size, spaced in a nice grid it is.

This is exactly what every aspect of technology looks like right now. You want a phone, it’s a rectangular slab of aluminum. Colors? Barely distinguishable variants of gray, and black. You unlock the phone, every icon is just text slapped on to a white background or an abstract shape that is wearing the brand identity uniform.

You open the phone, every app is a collection of white rounded rectangles and black text.

In fact, we’re in such stages of scaled homogeneity that even language is become a sum of averages thanks to ChatGPT (an LLM is language at scale!)

Scale is the enemy of creativity. Indie apps that have to make an app for one platform, and do it well, have much more fun app icons and interfaces than bigger players. Pre-industrial revolution furniture looked nothing like the sleek boring industrialized furniture of today because billions of units weren't being shipped to people.

When conformity is the norm there’s little room for soul, creativity or fun. Fun is aberrant, uncouth, rebellious. This is what using technology feels like today. It’s scaled to a billion people, but those billions of people are being drowned in notions of conformity, some dictated by mass production, others by product managers and dysfunctional software economies.

No wonder it’s boring and lacks soul. When you’re making something for everyone, you’re really not making anything for anyone.

The modern tech discourse is muddled with buzzword technologies being referred to as emerging technologies, collectively. So much so that when we think of emerging technologies, we fail to look beyond things like AR Glasses, Mixed Reality Headsets, or more recently "AI hardware" or "Agentic AI".

But that's not the limit of Emerging Tech Design. In fact, Designing yet another "AI hardware" or somewhat better "AR Glasses" completely misses the point of designing emerging technologies.

The Form Fallacy

Here's the harsh reality, a new form-factor isn't going to make AI hardware suddenly more useful. Emerging technology design isn't just about giving technology a new kind of input and output interaction.

Mixed Reality Headsets, Projection based interfaces, AR Glasses, AI Chatbots, are novel methods of interaction, that combine existing technologies into a sensor—actuator system (or input or output in the case of software) to create a new experience. They are a new form of housing for technology. Making them doesn't automatically make them desirable to people.

The Vision Pro presents a vision of spatial computing but fails to provide people a reason to buy it over a traditional computer. It doesn't really solve a pressing need in people's lives.

The Ai Pin failed, not because the form factor wasn't ideal, it failed because the device makers had no idea who their user was and so the product was little more than a string of cool demos at its best.

Emerging Technology is technology being used in a novel way to solve human problems. so that they spark our imagination of a different, better future. What gives them the "emerging" status is the promise of significant changes in people's lives through a new medium.

When the focus is on people and their needs, it seems counter intuitive to begin by wrapping a new technology in hardware. To reach a form, one must go through the process of designing it.

To design something you must know who you are designing for, and what is the problem to solve, before you can really finalize a form.

The Design Process

We start with the people, their wants and needs (the problems they are facing) and the actions they perform to achieve them.

The Form Smart Swim Goggles are the perfect example of how emerging technologies like AR prove to be useful when starting with a very clear user (swimmers in this case) and addressing their problems.

How We Arrived at Smart Swim 2 - What Went Into Developing Our Next-Gen Goggles

During my 4.5 years leading the product function here at FORM, it has been incredibly exciting and inspiring to watch the purpose of the company evolve to where we are today, knowing that we exist to elevate athletic performance through real-time visual feedback. Athletes of all types and abilities…

FORMPaul Hossack

Well, That's simple enough. So why don't we have more products that do this?

The reality is that each intervention results in intended and unintended consequences rather than “solving the problem”.

But before we focus on our intervention creating a feedback loop, let’s take a step back and look at the problem itself, and why trying to solve it is so complicated.

The problem

Our environment, circumstances and experiences shape our wants and needs, which are fulfilled by the appliances around us.

But these wants and needs, or the appliances that are designed to fulfill them don’t live in isolation. They’re part of bigger problems, that are being continually being shaped by our actions, appliances and the world around us.

Each Want and need points to a problem, that problem no matter how straightforward it may seem, is a part of a bigger more wicked problem. How do we tackle them then? It seems as if no new product (or emerging technology) is good enough at solving these seemingly untamable problems?

A quick primer on Tame and Wicked Problems.

There are no Tame Problems, Every tame problem lives inside a bigger wicked problem. To tackle a wicked problem, we slice it into smaller, somewhat tamable problems.

A Thin Slice of a bigger problem

Now that we’ve scoped out our problem. Let’s descope again. This time, by creating thin slices of the wicked problem. Identifying people, their immediate issues and how they connect to the bigger problems.

Once we have scoped out our problem as a complex system of elements and interconnected relationships, we find boundary objects to define the bounds of the thin slice of the problem we want to tackle.

With this thin slice defined. We must start our usual design loop. Person, Action, Goal, defines the solution we’re working.

Once we have a fair idea of the people, their actions and their goals. Each task can be divided into input information, the logic, and output logic. This forms the “How” of how a problem is solved.

Once clearly defined we have a good blue print for what we need to design our emerging technology interventions for. The goal of the intervention should be to better help people achieve their goals. Just like a scissor helps people cut paper, or eyeglasses help people see.

The Interventions

But how do we design the tools that perform the action? How do we design the “emerging technology”. There are many different ways of going about it. I would like to restrict today’s discussion to three methods.

1. Creating what's possible and practical for today
2. Vision Driven Design
3. Creating a speculative future

Creating what's most possible and practical for today

Time Frame: 1-5 years
The best approach for designing products that will launch on a 1-5 year time scale. They use existing systems to build a new solution.

To design products in this space the most practical way to start is to use existing frameworks like the DVF Framework, or the DICE Framework, or MIT Three Lenses of Innovation, amongst many others in order to deeply understand the problem space, and develop a design, tech and marketing strategy.

Remember here you have to ship something quickly, so your prototype solutions must know exactly how something is going to come to life, and how it's going to make money.

The DVF Framework is one of the many frameworks that can be used to identify the  who is going to need this product (desirability), how it's going to be built (feasbility), and the financial viability of the product (viability).

The DICE Framework and other similar frameworks are great for applications on pre-defined platforms like VR. They answer the question of "What kinds of applications would be cool for this platform?". In case of the DICE framework, it lays out clearly the kinds of experiences that would be great for VR headsets.

MIT's Three Lenses of Innovation frame the design problem as something that sits in the political, cultural and strategic contexts. It provides an alternative approach to DVF and DICE frameworks.

The Gatorade Sweatpatch is a great example of how to create novel solutions using emerging technologies (micro-fluidics in this case) using existing systems (the patch doesn't require anything but the smartphone!)

Gatorade Gx Sweat Patch for Athletes | Smart Design

Gatorade’s Gx Sweat Patch and companion app are designed to bring sweat testing and personalized sports fueling recommendations to all athletes.

Smart DesignChris Hintermeister

Vision Driven Design

Here designers define a long term vision for how they want to see design in a certain problem space evolve, take a principled stance, build out prototype of their vision, followed by a highly iterative process to reach to a good design.

This is a "making-intensive" and "learning-intensive" process of creating a prototype of the future and tweaking it based on user feedback. It’s driven by a personal vision of how technology should progress (e.g., screen-less computing).

Examples of Vision Driven Design Practices

Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is a similar design practice. Where Victor encourages designers to form a core principle for their work. One that's well articulated with a clear demarcation between right and wrong.

To explain his concept, Bret gives several examples of how inventors have followed a guiding principle to design their ideal world, leading to some profound inventions.

Douglas Engelbart's principle was to augment human intellect, where "knowledge workers" came together to build on each other's collective intelligence. Engelbart invented much of modern computing through this one vision. From Natural Language Search, to the Computer Mouse, to Collaborative Computing.

Alan Kay viewed computers as a medium to "bring new ways of thinking through computers". His work led to the creation of the world's first object oriented programming language, the Dynabook (spiritual predecessor to the iPad), and much more user research at Xerox Parc.

Bret's own principle is that "Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating" . His work led him to make Dynamicland, a community computer space that enables people to bring and interact with real world objects in a new computing media.

Most Vision Driven Designs fail because there’s obviously a gap between how we imagine things should be and how the things actually end up playing out. That’s inevitable. What's not inevitable is designers through iterative design, designers can tweak their vision and focus to align with what people truly appreciate.

With Vision Based Prototyping, Iteration is the most important step.

It’s in such a space that we get to explore new technologies in unique ways. I personally enjoy this space, as it helps me bring out my ideas in the world.

The Thought Lamp is a smart lamp, that acts as a student's ambient study companion. It's a computer that's only present when you need it, and in the background when you don't. It is based on my vision that technology must augment reality, not emulate it, and so it only presents itself when it can augment my reality.

Share Wagon is a community food sharing system, designed to tackle the problem of food waste in apartment complexes. Designed by me and my friend (Aylish Turner), it was based on our collective vision of community building through sharing.

Speculative Design

Time Frame: 50+ years
Speculative Designs are provocations that further the design discourse. This process leads to artifacts that are essential to jog people’s imagination on where the use / misuse of a certain technology might lead us in the distant future. They highlight an urgent need for change, rather than being the change itself.

Very useful if you want to raise awareness for wicked problems not clearly understood by society today.

The Future Cone serves as a useful way of looking possible, plausible, probable and preferable futures.

Uninvited Guests (by Superflux) critiques the ubiquity of "smart" appliances, through a day in the life of a 70 year old sometime in the future. The short film through its speculative design and artifacts explores themes of isolation, overuse of technology and a society obsessed with homogeneity and perfection.

Uninvited Guests — Superflux

Uninvited Guests is a short film that explores the frictions between an elderly man and his smart home.

SuperfluxBy

The Faraday Chair (1995, by Dunne and Raby) is a speculative artifact designed as a retreat from all the electromagnetic emissions generated by technology when it eventually becomes ubiquitous. The chair is supposed to give people "psychological comfort by providing sanctuary".

While the idea of a tech detox may not appear to be completely speculative today, 30 years ago, this was unthinkable, and the strong, provocative visuals sparked curiousity and interest in the matter.

Faraday chair | V&A Explore The Collections

Faraday chair, designed by Dunne & Raby, 1995; comprising of an oblong transparent orange acrylic box close fit to a clear acrylic base suspended in a steel frame with legs at the corners. Piercing at the top of the box near one end is a free-hanging silicon tube attached to a mouthpiece at the low…

Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the CollectionsVictoria and Albert Museum

We have an artifact that solves a clear human need. What next?

Appliances (or tools or design interventions) are great ways to tackle small challenges. As we've seen through our process.  A toaster is great solving for the need to have fresh toast at breakfast, but not much beyond that.

Remember, we started with a bigger problem, and de-scoped it into a very thin slice? So we've really just solved for a very small and specific need. The bigger problem is still largely unsolved.

We’ve solved a thin slice, what about the rest of the slices? We can take two different approaches here.

First, Product Growth (Vertical Integration) we increase our slice of the problem space and continue to grow infinitely. We grow our tool to encompass more problems and gradually get a bigger slice of the pie. Most traditional products have worked this way.

The problem with this approach is, unintended consequences add up as the product grows and result in adjacent wicked problems. For example the proliferation of the smartphone as one device to for all our computing needs has resulted in the adjacent issue of it amplifying loneliness and isolation through addictive apps.

Platforms, Protocols and Systems (Horizontal Scaling)

The second approach is, we acknowledge there’s only so much a product can grow until it becomes bloated and dishonest to its original purpose.

And we create a system that allows other slices to interact with our solution. Creating a fully formed puzzle where everyone comes together to solve the problem. The solution space still continues to grow, except this time, one company doesn’t have to do it all.

We create a platform and frameworks that enable more people to hook into our intervention and build out. Thereby delegating the process of tackling a wicked people to like minded people.

Tools that allow hooks into other solutions become platforms rather than appliances.

And before you know, your emerging technology product is not an appliance, it’s a platform that talks to and helps other talk to it to solve bigger problems.

Examples of systems

Remember the Gatorade Sweat Patch? It's not just a one-off product. It's part of the bigger Gatorade System that enables athletes to monitor their fitness.

The Gatorade Gx System

The Gatorade Gx is a good example of a vertically integrated system that aims to solve for an athlete's fitness monitoring using a range of low and high tech solutions.

The Lego Smart Play System

The newly introduced Lego Smart Play bricks are a set of primitive tangible technologies like a positioning system, a smart brick that coordinates with minifigures and other nearby objects to enable new experiences.

This is a great example of using emerging technologies. Lego built out a smart brick system to allow kids to have interactive gameplay sessions without looking at their iPad screens, and they didn't just stop at a standalone system, they literally built the building blocks that would enable kids to show their creativity.

IDEO's Food Waste Alliance

When IDEO started tackling food waste a little over 10 years ago, their big epiphany was that food wastage is a far bigger problem than what a single product could solve. So they started building out a system to tackle food waste which led to the Food Waste Alliance.

What the sustainable food future we’re working toward looks like

Over the last decade, we have been working with people, companies, governments, and organizations across the food industry.

The iPhone is a case study in emerging tech design

The iPhone is a perfect example of how a product started with immense clarity in who it were serving and what it was solving for, and then quickly expanded into a platform that anyone could build for. Unlocking new possibilities and capabilities that the iPhone excelled in.

The iPhone's biggest strength? Not all apps were made by Apple. In fact, almost all apps on the App Store are made by third party developers. While the iPhone keeps a tight rein on the platform, its platform of Apps might just be the best example of a horizontally scaling system that enabled the iPhone to be so much more than just a touch screen iPod, phone and an internet communicator.

Even in my own explorations of designing emerging technologies, I've tried to go beyond a singular appliance and build out systems or platforms that allow others to adapt it.

The Share Wagon Food Sharing System

The share wagon food sharing system is so simple and straight forward that it can be easily scaled and adopted by anyone willing to set it up in their apartment complex. The core of the idea is to share food with community. Such a system is easily adoptable.

The Thought Lamp isn't just an appliance for Math Problems

The thought lamp expands its actions and turns it into a physical and digital platform that allows anyone to build actions for it. Moving beyond just solving for students focus to a vision of augmented, ambient computing.

The Era of Techno-Centrism is Over

The success of the App Store brought with it the notion that software in your pocket could solve a multitude of problems, leading us into an era where tech took the center stage.

But as problems become more complex, and technology's impact grows, it's become increasingly clear that technology alone is not enough. It's only part of a bigger system that the problems and their solutions live in and when we start looking at those systems, tech's role in the solution space is hardly the center.

Designing emerging technology platforms with a systems lens, also marks a shift, where the understanding of the system, people and the platform  becomes central to the solution rather than the technology itself.

Further Reading:

1. H. W. J. Rittel, “On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the ‘First and Second Generations,’” Bedriftskonomen, vol. 8, pp. 390–396, 1972. [Online]. Available: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/agile/a%20-%20hold/Rittel-Planning_Crisis.pdfdougengelbart+1
   
2. S. L. Star and J. R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 387–420, 1989. https://www.jstor.org/stable/285080
   
3. D. H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT, USA: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
   
4. D. C. Engelbart, “A research center for augmenting human intellect,” presented at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference (commonly known as the “Mother of All Demos”), San Francisco, CA, USA, Dec. 9, 1968. [Online].https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
   
5. B. Victor, “Inventing on Principle,” lecture presented at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC), Montreal, QC, Canada, Jan. 2012. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqAcsis.pace+1
   
6. D. C. Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Menlo Park, CA, USA: Stanford Research Institute, Oct. 1962. [Online]. Available: https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdfarchive+1
   
7. A. Dunne and F. Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2013.

Early 20th century and 19th century furniture looked like this:

Then the Bauhaus Movement started. And everything became blander, more mass producable. So a coffee table began to look more like this:

This is what is happening to App Icons right now. Everything needs to be made for Light, Dark, and Tinted and Clear Modes. Everything needs to be ready to have multiple style variations, present brand logos, and be ready for ASO metrics. So an app icon is no longer one glyph that represents the app. It's a system of images that show up in different contexts in the app, and must present themselves as consistent.

So, instead of this:

We have this:

and this:

These icons maximise brand consistency (or rather sameness). Apple's Liquid Glass icons are Liquid Glass like, and they probably scale extremely well with all the different modes of icons that iOS and macOS support.

Same with Google and same with Adobe.

Undoubtedly, no one can say that the newer icons are "better" than the older ones. They're more consistent, yes, they "scale" across platforms and sizes while maintaining visual sameness (consistency as corporate designers will tell you).

They're meant for an assembly line of app icons that must be pushed out, in order to satisfy every thing but the want of a good visual design.

But here's the thing, the Bauhaus movement addressed the requirements of the industrial revolution, the need to scale manufacturing to meet the demands of many more people.

The industrialised app icons serve no one but managers and executives who conflate consistency with everything looking the same. Design leadership that cannot come with a design system that enables and celebrates creativity, and the harsh reality that companies care more about the "brand identity" than pushing something that's beautiful.

Most images online never get an alt-text description. Not because people don’t care about Accessibility, but because it takes time to look at a photo, think about a good description and write it down.

Shiuli (pronounced: She--ooh-lee) makes that process easy by helping people get started with the alt-text descriptions.

Simply pick an image, have Shiuli generate an alt-text description, edit it, and use it as alt-text in your images.

Alt-texts are great for Accessibility they help people using screen readers get a better description of the image. Making them even more accessible.

The best part about Shiuli? You never even need to open the app! You can use Shortcuts, Visual Intelligence or the Action Extension to get Image Descriptions from anywhere, making it a modular, versatile app that can run anywhere.

Below I go through the lexicographic, and design designs behind Shiuli:

About the name: "Shiuli"

Why give an alt-text generation tool that's so utilitarian, a name and icon like "Shiuli". And what does the word mean?

Shiuli (pronounced She-ooh-lee) is the hindi language name for a night flowering Jasmine (also known as Coral Jasmine) that's found blooming in Delhi and other parts of India during summers.

For an image description tool I wanted the name and icon to be evocative of the photos app, so that the connection between the two is clearly apparent. Which is why I chose the icon to be a flower.

Why the Shiuli flowers specifically? One fine day on a walk across the UC Berkeley campus this summer, I discovered the Shiuli flowers. Apparently for Berkeley, they bloom in summers.

Shiuli are the connection between two cities that I have been fortunate enough to call home. If I am to name an app after a flower, it'd have to be Shiuli.

Shiuli are the connection between two cities that I have been fortunate enough to call home. They grow both in Delhi in Berkeley. If I am to name an app after a flower, it'd have to be Shiuli.

The Icon Design

The icon design was a long iterative process. For the first couple of months, I simply called the app "Alt-Text". The icon then would be a generic image. At first I used the Hokusai's wave. but then quickly changed to something I clicked.

Briefly, I considered using Alty as the app's name, and Marigold (another plant that I love) as the app's symbol.

Once the name was set on Shiuli. The process then was to create an app icon that best represented the flower. At first I tried with the text on screen, since it's an app for alt-text, but eventually I found that flower itself was a much cleaner representation.

I tried different styles free form, cut, and accurate tracings, but eventually settled on something symmetrical and geometric.

An app icon or logo isn't merely a logo, it's brand identity. It must scale across different sizes, it must scale from simple line drawings, to glyphs, to skeuomorphic representations that look like an actual flower.  I did the same for Shiuli.

Design is Iteration

The development of the app started in April 2025. So why did it take me this long to release it? The reason is iteration.

While I had my first TestFlights running early in the development. I received a lot of feedback that shaped how the app looks, feels and works.

Shiuli Started as a Shortcuts extension, and barely had any UI in the app in its first build. Eventually through user feedback the app got better at the UI, providing options to edit the alt-text, and adding more actions along the way.

Post Liquid Glass, the UI changed drastically to embrace the specular highlights and glass effects in their entirety.

Action Centered Design

If you've been following my work over the last year, you must have realised that I have been championing for an action centered approach to app design.

The same's true for Shiuli. Shiuli from day one has been modular. It's an action-centered app through and through. Taking its primary action and turning it into an AppIntent, Shiuli builds UI on top of the App Intents and App Entities, rather than taking a phone app first approach.

The result is a product that works with cutting edge technologies like Visual Intelligence out of the box.

Information and Output: App Entities

All the information inside the app is governed by an App Entity, the App Entity. Each App Entity contains the image, and its alt-text description. All the information needed for Shiuli to present the UI.

Action: Generate Alt-Text for the image

The key action here is to generate alt-text, the action – an App Intent, takes an image as an input and provides the App Entity as the output.

The App Entity is then presented as UI across multiple modalities and Interfaces.

On Visual Intelligence The AppEntity, shows up in the UI with an Alt Text, on Shortcuts it turns into a data point for the next action, in the action extension it shows a version of the phone app's UI.

Only the UI changes across systems, the logic, and the data that powers the interface remains the same.

You can read more about Action Centered Design over here:

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.

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Supporting Cutting Edge Technologies

Shiuli on Visual Intelligence makes it easy to generate Alt-Text from anywhere. You just need to screenshot the screen, draw the area for whom you want the Alt-Text, and get it right there in Apple's Visual look up interface.

Because the app is so modular, it leads to interesting workflows such as this one where I press the Action Button and have it generate and copy the alt-text for whatever's on screen. Making the process of generating alt-text smooth, rather than cumbersome.

So that's Shiuli. It makes it easy to make images more accessible, and it's out now on the App Store.

Shiuli: Alt Text Generator App - App Store

Download Shiuli: Alt Text Generator by Squircle Apps LLP on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips and more games like Shiuli: Alt Text…

App StoreSquircle Apps LLP

Plus, It's not a subscription based utility, you just buy the app once and use it for lifetime.

This week Apple announced they'll be bringing a "Tinted" toggle for the Liquid Glass appearance. Adding a very thick blur to the UI if the person chooses that appearance. This is ofcourse in order to address Liquid glass' accessibility issues, especially when dealing with light backgrounds.

To me it came off as a surprise because Apple spent the summer tinkering around with the Liquid Glass UI, moving around the blur, saturation and depth settings to give it the almost right shape and then they've gone on to add this toggle. Clearly, they too see the Accessibility issues.

I think Apple can do better. I think they can take inspiration from their own pre-iOS 26 "Materials" design language and put them into Liquid Glass.

For Liquid Glass, IMHO Apple should provide a way to pick the type of Liquid Glass, Clear (i.e. the default Liquid Glass), Tinted (with greater blur and a color tint), and Frosted (a new type of material with even greater blur, but also a fun frost texture).

To illustrate why this is a better approach, I'd like to show some examples.

Spotlight Search

Creating a more legible search bar

Look at how the text below the search bar actually seeps into the search bar. Creating a very distracting layer of white text below the search bar, affecting the legibility of the text in the search bar.

In this search bar, a tinted glass effect ensures that the text below the search bar is not visible, while the colors still seep through. An added dark tint improves the legibility further. The blur isn't too deep. It's just slightly greater than the previous (clear) blur.

Apple Music Live Activity

Making the contrast better on a white-ish background

In this example we see how a lot of elements in this clear UI are less legible because of how the light refracts on the glass. Creating a confusing UI.

To solve this, I do three things.

1. Add a tinted glass background
2. Reduce the vibrancy on text and icons
3. Add a frosted glass layer to the seeker and volume control

This new UI works so much better. It's legible, and still shows the colors underneath the UI. Unlike Apple's approach of adding a diming layer underneath it.

Tab Bar

Creating a tab bar that works across different style of apps

This Tab Bar is good, but not the most legible tab bar. It also doesn't play with all the images. Especially because there is both text and symbols crammed into this little space.

A frosted tab bar on the other hand, retains the colors from the background, keeping the background light but at the same time adding a layer of frost, providing good contrast across the board to the tab UI.

I think Apple can solve their Accessibility woes with Liquid Glass by adding more materials to their design language. Liquid Glass is compelling and fun to use, but with any sort of transparency, it's very difficult to control how something looks and so it inevitably creates legibility issues in the UI.

Because Liquid Glass is not a traditional blurred background, fixing the issues needs the solutions to be a little more creative. I believe taking the approach to create a 3 tier system actually helps strengthen the material.

This summer I set out to redesign LookUp for Liquid Glass. It wasn't just a liquid glass update, it was going to be a major redesign, improving the app's layout, speed and interactions. It's a massive project, and I had only three months to complete it to get the app ready for the iOS 26 launch.

So I did what every prototyper does with big projects. Break them down into small, manageable chunks and make fake apps! Like every good prototype, the only thing real about them was the feature I was testing, everything else was scaffolding to aid the testing of the design.

What did each of these prototype apps contain? Here's a brief demo:

Sargent toolbar is a dummy app to test the result screen redesign, starting with the new toolbar controls.

The way it's designed, is that everything is a static image, except for the toolbars which are interactive and give a good sense of how the navigation of the new app flows.

Notice how janky the toolbar interaction is.

This updated interaction feels just right. Thanks to the fact that I was only testing the toolbars here. This was literally a 10 minute exploration with minimal code change. Fake apps are a massive win for rapid iteration.

Once I had the result screen locked in, I moved on to the new collections UI. New prototype. Only the collections screen was interactive, using dummy data.

The goal here was to test the interaction of tapping on a new collection and tapping across words. It serves no other purpose.

In fact, if you tapped on any other tabs they'd just not show anything. It's that straight forward.

The collector just served as a way to tinker and play with the collections UI, making the interaction robust and fast, everything else was scaffolding to give the illusion of a real app.

Root ranger was an interesting exploration. It's an app to test the origin maps feature. The feature itself originated from a very rough idea, i.e. what if we could map how a word has travelled across space and time.

For this one, I tried doing something I don't usually do, I "vibe-coded" my first exploration. But with more intention than asking ChatGPT to give me an app. I built out the 'map' of the action I wanted to support. Providing the information, the logic and the output user interface that I mocked up in five minutes.

The result was a usable prototype that let me explore the functionality for any word. Impressive for a 15 minute prototype. Fully interactive. But just an exploration of the feature. No other frills. No connections to the dictionary.

It served its purpose. It showed great proof of concept. Helped me iterate quickly and create a completely new feature in record time.

Apple's Foundation Models, introduced with iOS 26, enable apps to get artificial intelligence features through on-device Large Language Models, eliminating the need for using massive, power guzzling models for a small set of tasks.

Foundation models are immensely resourceful. They're also extremely tricky to work with, given how small the models are, they don't behave like ChatGPT or other LLMs, they need to be prompted in a very constrained environment and there are specific things they are good at.

So I setup a works-like test app to prototype new Foundation Model features on the one device I had that supports them. i.e. the iPad.

As you can see this is a total departure from other prototypes. It's a works-like exploration of ideas. "Designed" to give me maximum control over how the outputs show up, this is a bare-bones app where each tab works as a playground for different potential features.

I even built a prompt editor in there so I don't have to build the app again and again to get a new output.

Once the models were tested and designed to work exactly the way I wanted, I was able to put some of the features into the app. Like this Example Sentence quiz feature.

While on-device models are great, both on-device and server based models have one thing in common. They're incredibly slow by modern computing standards. And the amount of time or the exact steps they'd take to reach an output is unclear.

This calls for a new kind of a loading screen, one that's a little more playful than a circular progress bar. It needs to be as fun, and interactive as the liquid glass on iOS 26; it's so fun to play with, you almost loose track of time.

Like all other art pieces this little piece of interactive art, it starts as an abstract exploration and then converges into something meaningful. So, I built out a little testing playground to play with different styles.

The result was these stunning particle effects!

Here's a little secret. Every LookUp video I shared on the social media was not actually the LookUp app. It was Doppelgänger 26. An app that looks like LookUp, works exactly like LookUp, but isn't LookUp. It uses a series of charades, dummy data and convenient scaffolding that's identical to the strategies used in the other prototypes, to make it look like a ready product.

Why? It serves one purpose. To bring in all the research and prototyping I did all summer into LookUp. Bit by bit, I piece together the individual features I built out on fake apps. Gradually over the summer this app took the shape of LookUp; until it was ready to be LookUp, and then it replaced the old app.

With major design projects, it can be hard to get started, given the number of things required to be accomplished.

Breaking down the redesign into smaller, sizeable chunks and building it out bit by bit is the only logical thing to do. I hope this little sneak peak into the development process of LookUp was insightful.

You can try LookUp on Apple platforms here:

‎LookUp: English Dictionary

‎LookUp is an innovative English Dictionary app that combines a comprehensive English Dictionary with powerful vocabulary building tools. The app is perfect for English Learners and Word Enthusiasts who want to build their English Vocabulary. 1. Beautiful Word of the Day Illustrations ensure that y…

App StoreSquircle Apps LLP

With iOS 26, LookUp now has access to Apple’s on-device Large Language Models, making it easier to integrate AI into the app’s features when needed. LookUp’s AI vision has always been grounded in human goals and actions people perform to achieve them. Helping them learn better through thoughtful interventions.

LookUp 11.1 introduced Explainers and Pronunciation Tips. LookUp 12 goes one step further and adds new learning modes to the app, that help people build vocabulary in ways that enable them to actually build a better understanding of how to use the words in every day situations.

New Learning Modes

LookUp 12 uses the on-device Foundation Models to generate a set of example sentence quizzes. These quizzes, understand the person’s context and create a set of example sentences that enables people to better understand the word.

English Learners need a way to get better at using words in real world situations.

English Learners learn how to use a word by taking quizzes that quiz them on their understanding of a word, based on how it’s used in every day conversation.

Responsibly using AI

These learning modes aren’t just using foundation models to generate content. They are going through a methodologically crafted workflow to act on pre-defined guard rails to provide a holistic and reliable learning experience.

What that means is we use our own learning engine built on scientifically proven spaced repetition techniques and learning methods before ever giving AI any thing to generate. This ensures that the learning experience is one that’s reliable and not error prone.

Origin Maps

This is what a words origin looks like usually. I don’t know about you, but I am a visual person and this isn't a fulfilling or easy to understand experience for me.

English learners benefit when information is presented to them visually and one of the best ways of showing a word’s origins is to traverse its roots through space and time.

LookUp enables English learners to build their understanding of a word’s origins by visually interpreting its history on a map.

Responsibly using AI:

How do we use AI here? We use the on-device LLMs to transform the word’s etymology into a visual map that represents the word’s usage.

Again, LookUp isn’t just just asking the LLM to generate a map, it provides the Word, it’s etymology, and additional information that might help the LLM generate a comprehensive map.

Did you notice any sparkles here? Me neither. LookUp's AI features are rooted in real human needs and not in the urgency to use the shiniest – coolest new technology; and this is merely a first stab at Foundation Models.

As I play with them, I am sure I'll be able to create more useful features.

I've been working on redesigning and rebuilding LookUp from the ground up over the summer, and I just released the update this week to coincide with the launch of iOS 26; and just like every other year, this update too is a mix of Apple's announced technologies, often requested user feedback, and a step towards the direction I want to take the product in.

This year's update focuses on three key features: A complete redesign of the app, New Learning Modes, and Origin Maps. I will try to showcase all three of them in this portfolio of LookUp's changes.

Redesign

Anatomy of LookUp

The latest redesign for LookUp, simplifies the app into three key actions, i.e. Discovering new words, Collecting them, and Learning them. these actions mirror the entities responsible for each of these actions, i.e. words, a collection of words, and a learning box of a collection of words.

Discover

Language learners can discover new words either through the word of the day graphics or by searching for a word from the dictionary

Collect

Learners can collect / cluster the words together in different collections

Learn

Once collected, learners can then start taking quizzes and learning the words.

The simplified tab bar is a reflection of the key actions of the app

New Learning Modes

New learning modes people to learn more freely through through three  new learning modes. People can now learn through Interactive Quizzes. Example sentences, Conversational Questions.

Example Sentences presents contextually relevant and learner friendly example usage of the word, and quizzes the user on the meaning of a particular word in the sentence. This is a helpful way to remember how to use a word.

Conversational Questions offer a snippet from a conversation between two people. Based on that conversation the user is then asked to comment on a word that best describes the scenario. These questions dig one layer deeper than just rote learning a word's meaning. They check true understanding of the word.

The Learn with Example Sentences and Conversational Questions feature use AI in thoughtful and meaningful ways, i.e. helping people learn words, but also responsibly using AI to only generate content it can reliably generate.

The learning logic still uses scientifically proven frameworks such as the spaced repetition technique to create a learning set for the learners.

Origin Maps

Origin Maps is a fun new way to understand a word’s origins, which helps people to understand the word’s origins by tracing where it came from.

Origin maps are fun and informative in their own way. They help users understand a word's roots in a visual format. Also another cool use of the Foundation Models, transforming data from text to something entirely visual.

So this is LookUp 12, a major redesign for the app, that also includes meaningful updates that'll help language learners learn English in even more fun ways.

You can check the app out today on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/lookup-english-dictionary/id872564448

“Eyeglasses are a good tool—you look at the world, not the eyeglasses” - “World is not a desktop”, Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC 1994

Case Study 1: Designing distraction-free computers for students to address the problem of smartphone addiction.

Designing a platform of ambient computers using Action Centered Design

The Thought Lamp is a Platform built for, and using Action-Centered Design

A versatile design framework

Action-Centered Design expands well-beyond a single platform. It's a versatile general design framework that can be used to design everything from apps to systems to interact art projects.

Further Reading

Designing Distraction Free Computers

Designing distraction free computers using an Action-Centric Design approach.

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

Beyond Sparkles and Chat

AI helps best when it stops taking the center-stage

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

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.

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

Action Centered Design Framework

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

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

The way we interact with apps is changing, so should the way they are designed.

The current state of apps and the advent of Apple Intelligence makes it important to have an action centered design approach to designing apps. The phone is only a part of a much larger ecosystem.

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

Mark Weiser's The World is not a Desktop essay that forms the ideological basis of the design framework: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/174800.174801