Write about a big concept or passion or interest or questions you want to tackle with your thesis (not the technology!, i.e. better museum experiences, solutions for poverty, ways new technology can create accessibility, etc )… and why

With the advent of technology, people spend an increasing amount of time staring at screens. I don’t think I can or should remove our reliance on technology, I’d like to remove our reliance of small, fixed displays capturing our gaze for most of our waking lives.

Write a letter to your 60-year-old self explaining your approach

Technology solved a lot of problems with being communicating with each other or getting stuff done, but it seems like it’s come at the cost: dependence on screens. Today, screens have taken over a lot of our lives, and we stare at a screen for a good portion of the day. The weird part is, I don’t see an inherent reason why we need to be so tied to our screens. So I want to make it easier people to be able to use their phones and computers without screens.

In short, my approach is to look at how screens are useful, how they are harmful, and to create an interface that is as powerful as screens but without the drawbacks. I will examine each case where a screen provides an advantage, and find a screen-less substitute, taking a lot of inspiration from how we communicate face to face. For example, here are two advantages and responses:

• Advantage: Screens allow precise control, but other technologies like voice control do not. Response: It’s not the screen that provides the control, it’s touch input that provides the control. I think we still need to keep touch input, but we don’t need the output to be a screen.
• Advantage: Screens are vivid and can reproduce color and details accurately. Response: I think for most cases, this is not advantage: this causes people to be sucked into screens more than they need to. The technology to make crisp, non-distracting displays happened 20 years ago, with non-backlit LCDs on phones and calculators. If we want to look at photos and videos, screens are great, but that’s by far not the only case of computers. I’ll be working on solving the non-media use cases.

We interact with each other in primarily nonvisual, precise, and productive ways, and I think what’s missing in today’s digital ecosystem is exactly that — a kind of nonvisual, precise, and productive digital interface. Hopefully this won’t be too hard and I’ll have something to show for it in a few months!