Sometimes, the switches are stuck
Five fragments for the week of May 6, 2024
Hello May, hello deep spring. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that caught my attention last week…
Ben South: Lots of alpha in taking old UI patterns and applying them to AI: Instead of chat, why can’t I manage AI agents and tasks via a Kanban board? Instead of a thread, why can’t I browse responses from many models in a feed?
Jordan Singer: chat is a result of retrofitting AI into existing interfaces. there's entirely new paradigms to be explored
Raffi Chilingaryan: I hear this so often and yet I see none of it… not even prototypes. Would love to see someone drop a 20 second clip showing a “new paradigm” that isn’t made up of text & voice inputs, buttons, etc.
– A Twitter/X exchange I followed with interest, posted April 28-29, 2024. (Individual tweets linked above.) I saw Raffi’s reply first and then worked backward. I sometimes describe myself as an “interface person” and I too have been eager to see more novel paradigms. I want to see more of what it means to go with the grain of these new capabilities. Earlier: this post I wrote in late 2022 on interesting interaction patterns in generative AI apps at the time.
fake it till you build it
– Weiwei Xu on Twitter/X, April 17, 2024. Speaking of going with the grain. (Don’t miss the video.)
You have to design these things a bit more robust: a baby or toddler mashing in plastic pieces without care in practice means our cow regularly sounds like the rooster, and our dog like the chicken: sometimes, the switches are stuck, and sometimes, the plastic pieces trigger 1s next to the ones they’re supposed to trigger. In that case, having a fail-safe “uh-oh” seems like a good idea.
– Wouter Groeneveld, “Error Handling in Baby Toys,” April 1, 2024. Technology designed for kids just has to be more resilient. Relatedly, I’ve been interested in the observation that the rabbit r1 is a perfect kid device.
At first I was clamoring for multiple [virtual displays], but have found that 1 is fine because of how big I can make it. But I would love love love the ability to add a bit of curvature. The big virtual display, much like our earth, doesn’t make much sense […] flat. A little curvature would make all the difference.
– A “two months in” Apple Vision Pro wishlist posted to r/AppleVisionPro on April 24, 2024—lots of parallels to my ten-weeks-in take.
In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.
– William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984. Thinking about supply and demand. (Not far into this, but excited to read more on my new BOOX Palma. Thanks, Daniel!)
Until next time,
Diana
diana@matrix.vc
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. See you at Stanford on Wednesday…