Joel Kang

My favorite subject of inquiry is interfaces. Ever since I seeing Captain Janeway instantiate a cup of coffee with her voice, I've been obsessed with how we interact with the world around us: everything we do as human beings is mediated through some type of interface.

Ideas are communicated through the interface of language, and every door, button and symbol is an interface--whether digital or physical--designed to bridge two otherwise independent systems. Interfaces tell us what we can and cannot do, but they're often lossy representations of what is phenomenologically possible.

Every day, we evolve and adapt our mental models of how the world works by poking and prodding the interfaces that we encounter every day.

This mental model is the context with which we understand our lived experiences. It frequently bewilders me that even though no two people have exactly the same context, we've built entire civilisations across time and space by designing functional and beautiful interfaces. Everyone knows that Context is King, but nobody can actually say what kind of crown Context wears.

My academic and professional projects so far, have been to tease apart the interfaces of context, through language, semiotics and, more recently, at the
interface between humans and computers.

How can we shape and manipulate digital tools so that we can gain more context, and through that, more confidence in our work, our lives, and ourselves?

Currently, I'm a Product Engineer at Maihem, where I'm helping to carve out the interface between probabilistic AI models, and the demand for rigour of AI-powered systems.

I grew up in Singapore, where I started this exploration through linguistics. Finishing my degree in Cognitive Science in Providence, Rhode Island, I then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and currently call London home.

Welcome aboard my context spaceship, let's see what interfaces we bump into along the way. 🛸