These are, to borrow a phrase from literally everyone, unprecedented times.
This is not a blog about COVID-19, or Trump, or BLM, or Hong Kong or killer bees. Those topics deserve their own spaces curated by people more qualified to do so.
However, it says something startling about life in 2020 that even if you take those off the list, there are still tectonic changes happening in our society, the way we interact with each other, and the way we interact with technology:
—The rise of embedded AI is shaping the ability of our devices to recognize our faces, voices, and behavior. Most people in the US interact with an intelligent robot of some kind virtually every day. They're already doing complex branding work. Soon they will be driving us around, which is somehow a lot harder than everyone thought it would be.
—The democratization of software and hardware development has continued to support experience design with technology on smaller scales. The Raspberry Pi is a legitimately powerful $35 computer, but it's only the most visible benchmark. You can now buy a LIDAR unit on Sparkfun, which says a lot about the kinds of robots people can build in their basements. I myself took advantage of this trend when designing escape rooms.
—It's the golden age of human-computer interaction. We smoothly transition between typing, swiping, and speaking without thinking about how two of those three barely existed 10 years ago. The next 10 years will bring interfaces that are multi-modal, more predictive, more emotionally intelligent, higher bandwidth, and more closely tied with the physical form of the device.
These changes might seem low stakes. Run-of-the-mill technological progress, right? I will argue that AI and the internet of things have already begun to fundamentally change many aspects of what it means to exist in modern society, from the grandiose—how we derive meaning from life in a post-scarcity economy, to the quotidian—how we manage the logistics of an increasingly complex set of text messaging channels; from the vital—how we care for ourselves and support the health of those around us through all of life and death, to the entertaining—how we…well, you know what entertainment is.
This blog is also about me, it's true. Not in the sense that the work I do is so interesting that the world needs to know, but rather this blog is my journey navigating my own role in all of this as an engineer, designer, and entrepreneur. I'll talk about human-centered design as a philosophy, about being a technical generalist when the technology is simultaneously becoming more accessible and more arcane, and about what it feels like to get caught up in a new startup idea. I also have broad interests across tech and won't be able to resist writing about something if it lights my brain on fire.
Posts will come in two forms:
will be about a general topic or meta-level question, eg. why problem definition is the hardest part, or why start a blog. I'll still cite a lot of examples, but it will mostly be me speaking with my own voice. I'll try to keep the navel gazing to a minimum.
will answer specific questions that I'm interested in or that relate to the subject of the blog. One of the first that I'm working on is how word embedding technologies like GPT-3 are opening up new possibilities for rapid prototyping and design iteration.
I'll always maintain a mix of the two, but at the beginning there will be more of the former as I try to get down on "paper" my frameworks for thinking about this space. This serves to allow me to see if those frameworks hold up over time as I learn more, and gives me a reference point to respond to when I change my mind. Hopefully the latter moments will be both frequent and some of the most interesting to write about.
I should talk about the name. The name "HIXD", while annoying to try to pronounce (good options are 'hickst' or 'hicksid'), has a couple of interesting interpretations. The blog is meant to be about how people interact with technology, and how we can use these interactions to change the way we relate to each other. So it could be Human Interaction Design, H-IX-D, or it could be Human Interaction by Design, HIxD.
The latter interpretation is important, because it implies a sense of control. I will advocate for the position that we should not let technological change just happen to us. One can frame this position in a moral light, but I will usually choose more self-interested framing. Put simply: what kind of world do you want to live in? You have various kinds of power (financial, political, social) even if you're not a designer or technologist. My greatest hope is that whomever reads this blog will come out with strong feelings about how to shape the world around them to be more like the one they want to live in.
A few logistical things.
Most posts will be published publicly on Medium, LinkedIn, and, until people tell me it's annoying, my own social media accounts. However, there will be posts that only appear on my website and to the email list. This is so I have control over the way specific content appears, can moderate comments if I write about something controversial, etc. So please sign up for updates if you want to make sure you get every post. And it will make me feel nice.
So you can know what you're getting into, I'm listing the next few post topics here:
Finally, I've said a lot of things in this post with confidence, but this is still a nascent project, likely to change and evolve. Maybe I should be talking more about data and less about philosophy. Maybe "HIXD" is a terrible name.
I might figure some of these things out on my own, but I'd also love it if you'd take a second to offer feedback, either in the comments section or via a private message.
Thanks for your time and attention! I promise to always treat those with the respect they deserve.
-Ethan