Abidur Chowdhury

Head of Design @hark_labs
Formerly Industrial Designer at Apple

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@WillyB_303 Thanks Owen!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@Hamzah_M91 Great to hear!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

One of the first questions we asked ourselves when designing Hark Pro was - what is the material that personal intelligence is made from?

Thinking about materials is a natural question when building physical products - but it felt just as natural when building software for this new era of AI. It felt clear to us that the interface should start as a reflection of you, but how did that actually manifest itself?

This idea started as solid colours but quickly became using inputs about you, as prompts for a blurry, moody generated image. It was cool, the material for AI was AI. It took a lot of tweaks to actually get something good, and even still it was inconsistent, lacked interesting detail and we never managed to get it truly feeling like it had life.

Then we had a new idea, spearheaded by @Jonathan_Ravasz a dynamic ambient background that reflects your personal context, at any moment evolving throughout your day, represented as a live simulation of your sky. It was beautiful. Personal. Extraordinarily detailed, the way the clouds moved, how the product feels in the day and the night, how sunrise felt like an awakening and how sunset is the last burst before winding down. A dozen real-time signals randomised so you never get two the same - a moment in time personal for every single person on Hark.

It’s super cool, and yet another example of where interfaces are heading, personalised for each one of us.

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@Gramps_bloomers 👀 just the beginning!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@JimiBarkway Exactly!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@bhoga Yes!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

I've spent (what has felt like) every waking hour over the last year trying to figure out what the future of how we interact with technology is going to be alongside how it will look, feel and act.

We needed a bench in the office boardroom so it was a joy and well earned break to design some furniture. Only had a couple of hours to sketch/cad/spec the design but our wonderful local cabinet maker did a great job at bringing it to life. A simple veneer to match the cabinets, cushion to match the chairs, a small rounded cross beam and integrated usb-c ports.

Whenever we meet here I'm always drawn to sit on the bench, it's quite deep and you get a good view of the room. A small example of the standard we want to set of carving out time when you don't have any, to get the small things right.

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@tinybluedev In the works!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

We built panels so that you could make hark pro more personal. You can basically make a panel for anything: keeping track of deliveries, fitness progress, links to your meetings or a stock tracker.

We took care to build a system so each panel actually looks good and isn’t just slop.

They’re kinda like mini-apps built by you, for you that live in your home page with infinite configuration. Hit create a new panel and make some for yourself.

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@JohnMcKeownn Thank you!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@ricosystems Yes, the future is going to be your own personalised OS

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@julien_ducerf Fix coming!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@mokshaowei @hark_labs Thank you!!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@amish15chopra Thanks, will work on this

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@dean_shabi Will be making them better and more customisable every day

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@HenryLevak @hark_labs 🎯 Glad you’re enjoying!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@amish15chopra @vincehong Thanks for your feedback, we can for sure make this better!

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

One of my favourite details on Hark Pro is the way you can flick through the links sent in a stack in this quite whimsical design from @vincehong following whichever direction you flick the link.

A great illustration of how we consider every detail.

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

@itsarminbabaei @adcock_brett Glad you’re enjoying it! Thanks for the kind words, we have the best team! 🙏🏽

[Abidur Chowdhury @Abidur_C]

Sharing some early design decisions we made for Hark Pro. Fun to show the thinking on what makes Hark feel so magical.

We always felt that sidebars on AI apps were so clogged from managing all of your conversations you never really go back to. It felt like such a waste of space. So we had the idea of making the side bar something relevant and personal to you instead - something that showed you what was most important. That eventually became even better by becoming fully customisable for you with panels and proactivity in the platform today.

The core of that works because of our single thread chat and Hark’s incredible ability around memory and understanding you and your context.

Anyway here’s a fun little prototype of Hark back in December and how far we’ve come as a team to what we have today - so much better, more beautiful, capable but still holding on to those values that we knew would make an incredible experience.