Names matter. Years ago, back in the salad days of the late noughties/ early teens, there was a conversation I had with a whole lot of startup founders. It was a conversation about money, specifically how they would make some. Their investors were starting to ask for returns. As is my way, I sat down with some of these founders …
Design Thinking: the Baby vs. the Bathwater
There’s a lot of talk around here lately about ‘the Death of Design Thinking’ as IDEO goes through a massive round of layoffs and restructuring. “Is Design Thinking dead?” everyone is asking, and for a lot of people the answer seems to be an enthusiastic YES. But there is a big difference between Design Thinking(TM), a specific service offered and …
Cake or Death
Can we all agree that how we experience the world is important? So why do so many businesses still see experience design as an optional extra? This has come across my desk often enough this week for me to feel a need to post about it. Too many designers are still fighting for the right to do the jobs they …
Shared realities: the ontology of tech
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had cause to do some thinking about Voice Assistance Technology, specifically what kind of ‘personality’ these things should have. When the topic was first raised, my instinctive response was that it was the wrong question. It took some further mulling and conversation to work out exactly why. TL;DR: in order for trust – and, by …
Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]
[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …
Conversing with ghosts [post 45/100]
Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned sometimes. A friend who’s got teenage daughters tells me that these days it’s considered ok (by some) to carry on a conversation while fiddling with one’s mobile. This still is definitely not ok in my circles, and no matter how much I apologise I always feel terrible when something comes up that I feel I …
Bring on the noise [post 44/100]
How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …
An idol by any other name… [post 43/100]
The rationalists have been gaining ground rapidly over the past couple of decades. Atheism is, increasingly, equated with intellectualism*. At the same time (and probably not unrelated) we are surrounded by and immersed in technology more than ever, and more every day. We are urged and encouraged to believe in the progress of science and technology as the route to …