Clothes & Technology
My mother is a fashion designer. She has been for as long as I can remember.
Growing up, I would come home to fabric on the kitchen floor. I would stand on one end of it while she cut it with scissors. A week later I would walk into school and my teacher would be wearing what we cut on the floor. Or a friend's mom would stop me on the street. “Are you the son of Smadar?”
Two things stuck with me.
First, creation stopped feeling like a black box. The things around us are not handed down by the world. Someone makes them. If she could make something as basic as the clothes people wear, I could make things too. That is why I started building websites after watching a movie about Mark Zuckerberg, and ran my own hiking tours in my small town after one weekend with a guide. Things are not blackboxes. They can be done.
Second, I wanted to build things that become fundamental to how people live. Not products people occasionally use. Things that become part of them, like the shirt they put on in the morning.
Technology became my medium for that.
Every era of computing was defined by its interface.
The command line gave way to the mouse and the desktop, and computers went from tools for experts to tools for everyone. The touchscreen put the internet in a pocket and changed how billions of people live. Each time, the machine underneath mattered less than the way you reached it. The interface decided what was possible, who it was for, and what it felt like to use.
A good interface eventually disappears. You stop thinking about the mouse, the touchscreen, or the keyboard. You stop thinking about the clothes you put on in the morning. They become extensions of you.
I started interfaces.inc because we are living through the biggest shift yet. Computers can now think. But we still talk to this new intelligence through interfaces built for the old world. A text box, an app, a screen you go to and type into. The intelligence has leapt forward. The interface has not. That gap is the most important open problem in computing right now, and it is the one we work on.
Different projects, different companies, different mediums. The same underlying question. How does a person reach intelligence, and how naturally can intelligence reach back. I have been circling that question for years, and I do not think I will stop.
We start with speech, because it is the most natural bandwidth we have and the one most obviously broken today. Voice, whisper, silent, on the devices you already own. Over time it should become richer, more contextual, and eventually almost invisible.
Personal intelligence should dissolve into your life like the clothes you wear. The technology disappears. What is left is you, with more of what you can create.