Technology that doesn't care

I'm a UX designer at a fintech startup in Bangalore, which means I spend most of my working week trying to make financial applications intuitive and accessible and humane. I believe in this work. I also write speculative fiction about the ways it fails. The failure modes I'm interested in are not dramatic ones. Not the app that steals your data or the algorithm that discriminates. The quieter failures: the interface that works perfectly for the expected user and is completely disorienting for everyone else, the product that is genuinely helpful until it isn't. I design for intention. The fiction is about what happens outside the intention. I grew up in Thiruvananthapuram and came to Bangalore for work in 2019 and I write in the evenings in my flat in Koramangala. The story I'm working on is about a grieving process app that is very well-designed and therefore very good at what it does, and what it does is not quite what the user needed. The protagonist is not the user. She's the designer who built it. I think that's the right perspective. It came from a specific conversation I had with a product manager in 2022 that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.