I’m Shrikant Kumar. I’m trying to understand the things we build.

I am a technology enthusiast who is just trying to understand products in a better way. Not to review them or rank them, but to understand them: why they exist at all, how they changed over time, and what way of thinking sits behind the decisions that gave them their shape.

My background is in engineering, and for years my work was about how things are built. Somewhere along the way the more interesting question became why they are built the way they are. Why a spreadsheet is a grid. Why a link goes in only one direction. Why a phone wants to be held in one hand. Each answer turns out to hide an idea about people, about work, about what knowledge is. That is where philosophy comes in.

What you will find here

Long essays, each one an inquiry into a single product or technology. Each tries to trace its origin, follow how it evolved, and name the philosophy behind the choices that shaped it. I lean on Aristotle’s four causes as a loose map: what a thing is made of, the form it takes, the forces that brought it about, and the purpose it serves.

The research is slow on purpose. Where the history is uncertain, I try to say so. Where I am guessing, I try to say that too. The method page sets out the rules in full: how sources are chosen, how fact is kept apart from interpretation, and how decisions are judged on their reasoning as well as their results.

What you will not find

Hot takes, launch-day news, or verdicts on people and companies. The aim is to understand decisions, not to judge the people who made them. Most of the products in these essays were shaped by thoughtful people working under constraints I can only partly see.

Say hello

If an essay made you see an everyday tool differently, or if you think I got something wrong, I would like to hear it. Write to shrikux@gmail.com. Fixes to errors of fact are listed in the corrections log. You can also follow along through the RSS feed.