About

§ The question

I am left-handed. I learned early what a default does to a body. Tools expected the other hand. People corrected my gestures. I asked: why is this the default? Why is the design built for one body and not another? And where do I become the default that someone else must work around?

The question kept moving. A dropdown with two options where a spectrum exists. A grammar checker decides what English sounds right. A generative model polishes the sentence and erases my rhythm. A report keeps the result and drops the repair.

I study these encounters through my own experience: which route went first, who worked around it, and what survived in the record.

§ Position

Ishtiaque Ayub Zico. Born Dhaka, 1983. Based in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Living with a partner and three cats.

Two decades of work across web development and journalism, cinema and pedagogy, editorial and strategy. Some peers know me through 720 Degrees and its Venice nomination, teaching film at Pathshala, or the Biralpakhi cine club. Some labor stayed invisible: work behind the named roles. I read that history as anti-portfolio. Each role left skill, residue, and a question I could not answer inside that field.

The work kept returning to design. I use self as evidence. I study friction between body and bureaucracy, language and legitimacy, memory and machine.

§ Now

My research centres unlearning and design. It brings my work on language, pedagogy, gender, AI, and neurodiversity into a shared inquiry: how defaults acquire authority, and what it takes to change their priority. I want to develop this work through doctoral study.^[1]

The unlearning framework is my research lens and the entry point to this repository. Zicolonized is the ongoing manuscript.^[2] This site is the working surface.

§ Method

I use interface autoethnography: examining my own encounters. The self works as a sensor inside a designed system. Experience opens the inquiry. Notes, artifacts and recorded actions help me check what I remember and what I claim.

The unlearning framework asks whether a default loses its automatic priority, who performs the work, and whether the change reaches the next person. The framework stays provisional. The cases test and challenge it.

§ Contradiction

I write in English shaped by Bangla, cinema, internet habits, institutional prose, and compromise. I use English while tracking what it edits out. I use AI while studying how it changes my writing and influences my thinking.

I prefer partial honesty to false completion. The seam stays visible. This page is made inside the contradictions it names.^[3]

§ Contact

Email me about a page, a research question, a tool problem, or a collaboration with a clear scope.

hello [at] ishtiaquezico [dot] com^[4]

§ Site

This is an unlearning repository. It began as a personal website in 2001. Then a portfolio. Then a lab. Now it keeps writing and revision in one place.^[5]

Log holds essays, notes, and versioned drafts. Lab holds tools and experiments. About records position and terms. The archive rereads past roles through unlearning.

I design for a reader who is tired, distracted, low-vision, multilingual, mistranslated, suspicious, or future me. The page should hold thought without punishing attention.

§ Colophon

Semantic HTML, plain CSS, and minimal JavaScript for Lab tools. The document stays readable without styling. Links stay usable without scripts. Print stays part of the archive.

Built with Zola, backed up on GitHub, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

The visual approach stays quiet on purpose: large text, steady rhythm, plain hierarchy, few moving parts, and little chrome.

§ Terms and use

Unless a page says otherwise, text is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. You may copy and share unaltered text for noncommercial use, with attribution and a link to the license. For commercial use or sharing an adaptation, ask permission unless an applicable legal exception permits it. Code and images are not covered by this text license unless stated otherwise.

This site favors low extraction. I prefer that this work is not used for AI model training, corpus ingestion, or dataset construction. For uses requiring additional permission, contact me.

I leave out details when disclosure would move cost onto someone else. The work can be public while parts of life stay private. Drafts change between visits. I correct errors of fact and note the change.

§ Endnotes