Brain Machine Interfaces and UX/UI Design — Intro

Steyn Viljoen
2 min readMar 1, 2020

In 30–50 years from now, it is highly unlikely that you will read or listen to a post like this on your phone.

In fact, you won’t find yesterday’s sports results by typing words in a Google search box, tomorrow’s weather by summoning your Apple Airpods or the newest meme on Twitter by scrolling through a feed filled with favorite buttons and retweet counts.

In the future, you will simply know the information you need, the split second you want it.

Welcome to Brain Machine Interfaces.

Today, people spend billions of dollars on researching and developing Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI’s). No industry is worth billions of dollars without a significant problem that needs to be solved. Especially not when it’s as fascinating as this one.

So what is this problem people like Elon Musk and others are trying to solve and why is it worth solving? More importantly for me, what are the fundamentals behind it, and how will it impact the work we do as UX and UI designers today and the decades to come?

Over the next couple of months, I will try and unpack this in a series of exploratory posts to not only help me understand this topic better but to also invite feedback and scrutiny from those who’ve been around the block a couple of times.

So if you work in this space or have any thoughts that might help me unpack this topic, let me know in the comments below. Or, if you’re just curious, follow me to see where this (neural) pathway might lead to.

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Steyn Viljoen

Husband to a beautiful wife. Noob dad. Product designer. Learner writer at viljoen.space. Finds solace in gardening.