Headaches, neck pain, and back pain have been a constant backdrop to my professional life working at a desk. In 2010, the pain became so severe that I ended up getting a CT scan, which led to a referral to a neurosurgeon, which then led to an MRI. The results showed historical damage to my cervical spine from C2 all the way through to C7.
During my first appointment, the neurosurgeon asked, “Do you have any recollection of some sort of traumatic injury, like something you’d get from someone diving into a shallow end of a pool or something like that?” I hadn’t thought of it before, but it immediately became clear that it must have been when I fell from a first story, hitting my head on rocks while on holiday visiting family in Croatia back when I was 12 turning 13. I had a massive egg on the top of my head from the fall. I’d passed out, and my auntie carried me up from the small grotto that I fell into. I sort of shrugged it off and forgot about it. Being young and flexible, my body must have dealt with it at the time. The full extent of the damage only became clear in 2010 when I was 45.
Finding this out was a bit traumatic, but knowing the cause of the pain helped because I sort of knew what could be done about it. When you’re in a state of pain and it’s going to take months or years to resolve, surgery is like the “nuclear option.” There was a lot of anguish in deciding what to do. I decided not to go for the surgery option. When you’re in that sort of level of pain, it’s hard to think through that your body could recover. It took like three to four months of continuous pain, but it actually did get better. I started to do more yoga. I researched things and did some basics, exercise stuff, and slowly my body dealt with it.
After that, maybe it’s my nature as an engineer, I started thinking of ways of being able to work even when in pain. One of those was having a supine workstation, but that also led to a series of concepts that I put under the name of Surface Symbolics. This started a few years of effectively R&D into the concepts initiated under the name of Surface Symbolics, which later changed into visual touchscreens.
I’m posting this in 2025, even though the date of this blog post is 2012. The reason behind that is all the videos that I’m including here are concept videos I created back in 2012. Subsequently, I tried to make the concepts into a commercial reality, but eventually decided to give up on it in 2015. So this blog post is just a record of those concepts and the videos I created to communicate those concepts.