When I came out of the regular 70mm screening of The Odyssey last week, this post was going to be titled why 5 perf 70mm should be the format that everyone makes movies for. Things have changed since then. I saw The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, it's clearly the more superior viewing experience. I did a little more digging into why that is, and what makes it ultimately unsustainable.

But first the taxonomy of movie formats.

These are the different film formats that have been popular through the many generations of film capture. When someone says a 35mm film project, what they mean is that the film reel that has a width of 35mm was used to project the film.

A smaller film means bigger magnification required to fill the same screen size or smaller screen-sizes. A bigger film allows for a significantly bigger projection with better image quality.

The Cinematic experience is all about creating an immersive experience, picking as big a screen as possible to completely engross the viewer in the experience.

The very first step in the quest for a wider, more immersive experiences was the cinemascope or the anamorphic lens. It was able to squeeze a much wider frame into the same 4 perf 35 mm reel. Creating a more immersive experience.

The 2.4:1 aspect ratio, known as scope, became the industry standard for years to come. Given how cheap it was to make widescreen cinema with just a lens attachment to the 35mm film projection.

The introduction of the 5 perf 70mm reel meant that you could get a similarly wide picture in fact slightly taller, with a bigger negative. Which meant lesser magnification from the projectors, better image quality, and bigger screens.

The IMAX 70mm takes this one step further. It creates a horizontally fed 70mm reel, that's much bigger than any of its counterparts, creating the highest resolution you can get from an image.

Difference between 70mm and IMAX 70mm

Smoother image

The IMAX 70mm frame is thrice as big as the standard 5/70 frame. Because it’s using the same 65mm film stock, and just placing it horizontally.

This means the chemical "grain size" embedded in the film emulsion is identical, and because it’s a much bigger frame, the magnification ratio is lower than that of the standard 70mm film, which leads to an image that minimizes the grain to the extent that it’s barely visible.

Rich details are clearly visible

The significantly larger negative allows for more light to pass through. Allowing it to project a more richly detailed image that captures the nuances of texture and shadows beautifully.

In the Odyssey, you can experience that in scenes that show the sea. It’s a much more richly detailed visual with better color and detail.

Better sound

The sound on an IMAX 70mm is presented through a separate 12 channel lossless audio track, delivered on disk. It’s not part of the reel; unlike the standard 70mm reels which featured a 6 channel audio track on the film itself.

This results in a better sound. In my experience, the sound was one of the biggest differentiating factors with IMAX 70mm, it’s so much louder, and for a movie like The Odyssey where the soundtrack is as much part of the experience as the characters in the movie itself, it’s night and day.

Projection improvements

IMAX also made improvements to the projection tech. While the standard 70mm projectors use mechanical systems to pull each frame at a high speed, the IMAX system uses a vacuum system to pull frames so that they stay flat against the camera lens. Eliminating any micro-jitters that standard 70mm film projections have.

Simply put IMAX 70mm is the best image quality you can get from a projection system today. It surpasses digital projections by a mile, its closest competitor the 5 perf 70mm projection, pales in comparison.

Why can’t you just crop to 1.43:1?

As you probably know by now, with movie theaters, the hunt is about immersing the viewer in the largest possible video that plays well. Sure, one way to do that would be to make a smaller image and letterbox it to fit on a widescreen.

The issue there is that it’ll look much worse than fitting the entire image and losing some of the peripheral composition. Filmmakers are generally really good at framing there shots for scope and 70mm frames so you never really miss critical details.

It’s also an issue no one has really had to face, prior to The Odyssey. The first film to be entirely shot on a horizontally rolling 65mm stock with 15/70 framing. Prior IMAX 70mm films have used a combination of IMAX film cameras, and 5/70 perf (Oppenheimer), or VistaVision (One battle after another) to film their movies. So naturally, watching it in either of those formats would yield great results for the most part.

The other issue is that IMAX owns the rights to its IMAX 70mm projections including viewing in the 1.43:1 aspect ratio. Which is even bigger of an issue than it seems.

Why this is unsustainable

IMAX has successfully managed to turn what was once a commodity into a highly differentiated experience, that people want to pay for. IMAX 70mm is a selling point today. People flock the screens for a unique experience that’s unlike any other, and IMAX can’t keep up with the demand. There are only 41 locations that can screen it in true IMAX and the scarcity adds to the appeal. The Odyssey’s IMAX 70mm shows are sold out for months (even if the next door Dolby auditorium is practically empty)

That’s a good thing right? Depends on the lens you are looking at with. Sure, in the short run it’s a novelty experience that filmmakers would be happy to support. Only 41 cinemas in the world can experience it, it’s unique, and coveted. But as demands for these grow, IMAX will have to confront with the question of how this reaches more people.

For one thing, IMAX reels are huge and unwieldy. Transporting and storing them is a menace. Not only that, the projectors themselves are sort of a lost art. These are 50 year old machines whose parts are difficult to source now and making more of them is infeasible, so IMAX finds and retrofits old projectors. And even if IMAX were to make more of them, new IMAX 70mm screens need a lot of space. The projection screen needs to be massive. Which lowers the pool of possible theaters even further.

This is not an easy problem to solve. For one the logistics of making a highly specialized projector more accessible are going to be challenging. Traditionally specialized projections have not done well. The biggest reason for Anamorphic projection’s success was that it relied on the already widely available 35mm projectors, and required only a simple lens attachment.

IMAX is a closed standard, that gives IMAX the company a lot of success, but also acts as a bottleneck for the prevalence of its technology. Everything needs to go through them, and few cinemas across the world are willing to invest in giant auditoriums with giant screens that will cater to a large audience at a time that would support their standards.

And even if they were successful, it would then create a monopolistic situation where every cinematic experience would practically have to go through them.

So what’s the future of large format films? I believe it still is the standard 70mm format.

There are enough 70mm projectors extant in the world that can handle 5/70 vertical loading films, the image is still high resolution, if not as good as the IMAX 70mm, and it’s not controlled by one entity. So anyone can make a 70mm film. More importantly people still know how to make 70mm projectors.

There are other formats that would be good to explore. UltraPanavision (The Hateful Eight) offers are wider 70mm projection, using the same technique as anamorphic 35mm. The image is close to IMAX 70mm in width at least, and more accessible as a format that fits nicely in scope screens.

The much lesser known 8/70 vertical film offers an aspect ratio closer to the IMAX 70mm aspect ratio, while not being as unwieldy as an IMAX70mm film or requiring specialized projectors. Retrofitting old 70mm projectors to push 8 perfs at a time is much less of a challenge than making new IMAX 70mm projectors.

However this would still require bigger screens, and it’s an odd compromise that may not work for most, and may only be viable in the scenario where 15/70 projectors are no longer feasible to run but theaters still have bigger screen.

It’s fascinating to watch a movie on a giant IMAX 70mm. I feel lucky and privileged to live near a theatre that supports that. That said, I strongly believe going to movies should not be about privilege, or guarded behind proprietary tech, for it’s a form of cheap and accessible entertainment for so many people.

I would love to see, more accessible film formats show up in the future.

Download it in poster format here

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.

1. There are three ways of curing any addiction: Removal, Substitution, and Habit Change, Removal is the most rudimentary form that doesn't always work.
   What dumb phones, devices like Brick , and other screen time apps try to do is solve the problem by removing the 'bad' apps. They punish the user by limiting access to apps that are likely to make them addicted to the software.
   
   So if smartphone addiction is being treated like nicotine addiction, removing social media applications abruptly isn't very effective [1] and chances are you'll come back to it.
   
   A much more effective method would be to look for a habitual change in how we use our smartphones and a re-assessment to our relationship with technology in general, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that people are already doing that.
   
2. Smartphone addiction is not about a single app: It's a cycle of rewarding engagement and continuous use, that when reaches a saturation point leads to addictive software application that over time has led to smartphone addiction.
   
   It's not the third party software or a single type of application that's a problem. It's the scale with which this software works, that has led to the unintended consequence of applications designed to be addictive.
   
3. The zeitgest is that people want to use less technology not buy another gadget to cure the previous one's addiction: If you talk to youngsters today, people are done with tech and their insidious business models. They assume the worst of every tech company, and they're wary of new "products".
   
   During my own user research, what I've found is that young adults cherish analog tools a lot more for focused work. The role of tech in our lives then should then be to step back and help them continue to use those tools. Providing help when they need it.

At the heart of the smartphone addiction problem is the fact that we've put everything behind a single slab of glass, which means that a single screen controls much of our interaction with everything and because everything from entertainment to productivity is vying for the same slot of our attention, the result is a miasma of applications that no one wants to use.

The solution to that might not be more technology, but for tech to take a step back and empower people to use analog tools more.

Further Reading

[1] : M. M. C. van Wezel, E. L. Abrahamse, and M. M. P. Vanden Abeele, “Does a 7-day restriction on the use of social media improve cognitive functioning and emotional well-being? Results from a randomized controlled trial,” Addict Behav Rep, vol. 14, p. 100365, Jun. 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2021.100365.

[2] A. Monge Roffarello, View Profile, L. De Russis, and View Profile, “The Race Towards Digital Wellbeing,” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–14, May 2019, doi: 10.1145/3290605.3300616.

[3] I. A. Anderson and W. Wood, “Social motivations’ limited influence on habitual behavior: Tests from social media engagement,” Motivation Science, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 107–119, 2023, doi: 10.1037/mot0000292.

[4] B. Victor, “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design.” Accessed: Oct. 05, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

Addendum

Yes, Smartphone addiction is also about the loneliness epidemic that engulfs our generation right now. But there's a fine line between :

1. Conscious use of addictive software as a form of escape,
2. An insidious use of design patterns to keep you hooked onto a software.
3. Entertainment applications winning our attention because they're competing in an A/V medium.

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.

Pixel PostsVidit Bhargava

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.