Medicine, machines, maps.

What we use to know ourselves changes us.

I have spent twenty years designing products. At Ola and Jio, I contributed to products used by hundreds of millions of people. I trained in information design at NID, where cognitive science was part of the curriculum.

An interface decides what you can see and what seems possible. When I became ill, I encountered those decisions from the other side: as a patient trying to understand my body through test results and medical papers.

The problem is older than medicine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, a young man carrying a written speech draws Socrates outside Athens. There, Socrates admits he still does not know himself. The speech is a pharmakon: the same word can name a remedy or a poison. Later in the dialogue, writing itself is offered to a king as a remedy for forgetting, and he refuses it as a poison.

Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy reads that scene closely. He calls an aid like writing a supplement, and the word hides a paradox. A supplement adds to something that should already be complete. It also stands in for something that was missing. If memory were whole, it would not need writing. If it needs writing, it was never whole. Plato fears writing will weaken memory. Derrida asks where that healthy, unaided memory ever was. Memory has always leaned on signs. There is no clean boundary between a capacity and the supplement that sustains it. Walk into any pharmacy and you will find a shelf labelled supplements, sold as if the word held no paradox at all.

The body works the same way. Cells talk to each other through hormones and peptides, signs sent and read. A medicine joins a conversation that was already running. When I was ill, I kept looking for the healthy self underneath, the one I would get back once things were fixed. I never found it. I found a body that had always depended on signals and had lost track of some of them. Every test result and every pill was a supplement. Each one helped me read myself, and each one changed what there was to read.

That is the difficulty I carry into my work. A test or a map makes the world accessible through a particular frame. I want to build instruments whose assumptions can be inspected and whose conclusions remain open to challenge.