Notes & experiments by Mary Huang.
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I’m building my own personal AI operating system. I’ve worked as a UX designer for emerging tech for more than 10 years. I’ve been fortunate to work on many creative products, from 3D printing to VR and games. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen how the incentives of the tech industry lead to consumer technologies made to extract our attention and lock us in to a corporate platform. AI is different. I…
A library of minimal, parametric designs for the home. I've always wanted this to exist. Consumer desktop 3D printing has finally become mainstream. I've met a 73-year old woman who owns a 3D printer and dads printing toys with their kids. There are plenty of amazing designs out there. But browsing for them sucks up time and creative energy. I just want that calm sense of organization you feel…
Every interface now feels outdated. I notice the effort I put into dragging windows on my screen. Finding the application after it’s minimized. Searching for files. Searching for the right app. Searching for the settings panel to toggle the right setting. Searching the web to find that settings panel. Settings is the junk drawer of any app or OS, and yet it’s the drawer I most frequently open.…
We’ve architected this intelligence very much in our own image. Its eagerness to please and be useful are strong fingerprints of its maker. See it not as a tool but as a reflecting pane, and we grapple with ourselves. Do we equate our own identity with work? Do we measure ourselves by others? When do we make intentional choices? How freely do we share information? How do we organize the jumbled…