I’m Evan, the principal engineer and researcher who leads Thoughtful Things.

I got my first computer when I was six. It had 256MB of RAM, and I used it to play with a program that turned numbers into musical notes. In hindsight that might have set me on my course in life: music, technology, and doing more with less.

So what are “thoughtful things”? I coined the term during my PhD in an award-winning research paper about “teaching things to think”. The paper isn’t about music devices, but it blended some design philosophies that still motivate me today: human-centricity, low-resource computing, and enriching user experiences.

I started Thoughtful Things to combine my research background in human-centered computing with my love of experimental and boundary-pushing music technology. In my free time I like to hack on old tape machines, turn sea levels into music, and write poetry with hallucinating speech to text models.

Core Principles

1. Technology for people’s sake, not for technology’s sake.

2. Augment people, don’t replace them.

3. Do more with less.