GenAI has permeated everyday life. The go-to answer for millions of people faced with any number of different tasks. So why does it have such a basic monochrome interface? Open a browser or app for any of the mainstream GenAIs, and you’ll be faced with some variation of a black page with a box for entering white text into. You can turn the mic on, upload a file or image, but those are ultimately context-driven sideshows. The text box is the start-point for almost all GenAI w

"Praxis is the idea that you do something cos you want to do it. And after you've done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it." Tony Wilson said that in 1984, sitting in a bathtub in south Manchester, trying to explain Factory Records to anyone listening. It sounds romantic. It sounds like permission to follow your gut and figure it out later. But that's a misreading.

On Side 1 of Television’s 1977 LP ‘Marquee Moon’, you’ll hear Tom Verlaine sneer: “How does a snake get out its skin? Here's a depiction…” The answer is of course ‘Friction’, as the song title has already given away. Use that F word in a tech environment though and people recoil in horror. There are very few concepts more repulsive to a UX designer or Product manager than that of friction. Metrics are dedicated to the elimination of friction in all its unseemly forms.

Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n