My thesis presentation doesn’t have slides; this is a transcript.

Why do we look at screens every day? Literally so much of our interaction, when communicating with people, entertaining ourselves, and getting work done, requires looking at a screen.

Yeah, I know why we need computers and phones — people are remote, and we want to save our stuff instantly to the cloud. But why is that the only way to use our digital devices is to stare at a screen?

I want to try out a future less dependent on screens. Can we use phones and computers without them? For my thesis, I’ll try to create some devices and accessories that make this possible.

——

Okay before I talk about how I’m going to do this, I want to quickly address why I want to do this:

• One reason is that screens are distracting and addicting, aren’t conducive to collaboration or even getting up from your desk or going outdoors. Our eyes are glued to a very tiny hole in our field of vision — a very unnatural thing for human bodies to do.
• The other reason is more of a larger societal issue, but it’s a little to long to explain here.

——

Okay, so for these reasons I want to build things that allow us to interact with technology without screens. What exactly am I thinking? I’m not 100% sure yet, but I think a good starting point would be to build a device that allows us to input stuff accurately into a computer without looking at a screen, [[just like this.]]

Okay, so that already exists. This is actually a simple tool I made this past week just to prove that something like this might be useful.

For my thesis, on top of this I want the input device to also be usable while I’m moving around. This keyboard can’t do that. So how can I do that?

For inspiration, here are some things I’ve looked at:

• Voice assistants, voiceover, watches, all of which can be operated without starting too hard at a screen.
• I looked at the evolution of HCI up until present day. In particular, the keyboard -> touchscreen evolution allowed us to interact more directly with a computer, and I think what I’m trying to do is the next step of that.
• This semester I took Textile interface, where we saw things like Project Jacquard, digital controls woven into jeans.
• Next semester I’m taking the haptics class, where I
• I also look at simple things like a snooze button on an alarm, a ubiquitous invention specifically designed to be interacted with with our eyes closed. (Btw, how easy is it to hit snooze on a phone? Not as easy)

——

Anyway, I think I’ll try to make some kind of mini chorded keyboard, one where you typically press more than one button at once, which means it doesn’t need as many keys. This keyboard should communicate over Bluetooth with a phone or computer to input text.

I’m going to set this as something I can make a few weeks into the new semester, so that have experience using it and iterating on it the entire semester.

———

Once I have that down, I’ll use feedback I get from myself and others using the device to figure out my next steps. I might decide to prioritize:

• Making it smaller and more robust
• Making it do more than just inputting text
• Making it work with more kinds of devices
• Making a second related device
• or not building further, but spending time coming up with the best use case of the device and creating a pitchable vision.

I won’t know exactly until I get there.