DOT BY NEW COMPUTER, 2023

In the 2020s, while most people building AI saw it as better storage and recall: a way to fetch the right document faster, a smarter autocomplete.

New Computer didn’t think a better filing system was the most interesting proposition. To them, the missing piece wasn’t just intelligence, it was relationship. What if a computer didn’t just store information, but understood the relationships between ideas? What if it wasn’t just retrieving knowledge, but thinking alongside you? What connections could it make? What if a computer didn’t just compute, but cared?

New Computer’s first product, Dot, was a culmination of some of these ideas. They wanted to build an OS to help the user connect the dots, and together, we explored ways to communicate their vision.

A theme that kept surfacing throughout our conversations was the idea of a “living history.” This idea of a recursive conversation traced back to the earliest dreams of computing. Vannevar Bush’s Memex, envisioned in the 1940s, imagined a system that didn’t just store information but created associative trails between ideas — mirroring how human memory works. Decades later, J.C.R. Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis expanded on this, describing a partnership where humans and computers didn’t just interact but actually thought together. Dot wasn’t a hard drive with a chatbot slapped on top; it was a chronicler that could synthesize context and weave them into a dynamic wikipedia of your life.

I started writing:

and I started putting together images to build a coherent narrative for what New Computer was setting out to achieve:

For the logo, we wanted it to reflect the name of the product, Dot, while also symbolizing a symbiosis with the user, as well as hinting that this symbiosis was built through conversation. The resulting yin and yang of two dots encircling each other to form quotation marks was a natural conclusion of these ideas.

The website launched in 2023, and on the app store in June, 2024.

I worked to develop the story of Mei, the character through which we illustrated our ideas that put the human first. With the technical features taking a supporting role, the resulting arc of Mei’s story with Dot was fluid, emotional, and relational.

CREDITS

Team: Jason Yuan, Samantha Whitmore, Joe Tsao (Body Shop)