In 2012, the lovely and talented Kitty Leering asked me a question that changed the way I was thinking about rather a lot of the things I’d been thinking about. We were talking about Picnic 2012, and she asked me: “What does it mean to own yourself in the digital world?” I did a talk on the topic, and have …
Access is the new ownership, redux [post 7/100]
A couple of years ago, I did a panel at MIPCOM called “Access is the new Ownership” – it was all about how consumer attitudes to media have shifted over the years and how content owners’ business models need to follow suit. Essentially the logic goes like this: People want to watch/listen to the content they love. Most people do …
Master and servant [post 6/100]
Who’s the boss in our relationships with our technology? Over the weekend I had lunch with a friend, who told me about a client meeting he’d had last week. The client was wearing some sort of connected watch, which kept beeping and flashing alerts at him throughout the meeting, which he kept glancing at and mostly dismissing, but which still …
Skulduggery: a new frontier [post 5/100]
Next month at MEX, I’ll be doing a talk and some workshopping on designing for the IoT. I’ve been considering ways to get people thinking a bit differently, and one of them is to think about the darker side of connected objects, homes, cars and so forth. And because everyone loves a good heist/thriller/game of Cluedo, I’m going to get …
Something something systems thinking, part 1 [post 4/100]
Today’s a little crazy, not all that much time to craft a post. So I’ll open a conversation that will continue over the coming days… Lately I’ve noticed (I’m sometimes a little behind in noticing things, partly because I really don’t want them to be true) some rather alarming things about how design is carried out in companies large and …
Foucault’s Robot [the digital creep factor, continued][post 2/100]
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year is why certain interactions with algorithms feel so creepy – not the annoying stuff, like the “you’ve-just-bought-this-thing-so-why-don’t-you-buy-another-one” advertising algos that are all the rage at the moment, but the things that really freak people out. Example (true story): a few years ago, after many months of …
Singularity, Schmingularity
There are those who insist that by 2045 we will have achieved the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence will have surpassed our own. This may be the case, but then again it may not be. In the 1960s there were those who thought they could crack AI in one summer. What’s interesting about the AI debate is… well, a lot. But one …
The hero with a thousand faces (thanks, Joe Campbell)
[I’ve recently been re-reading some of the work of my hero Joseph Campbell, which inspired my talk on Monday at Next Service Design in Berlin, which you can watch here. Below is (more or less) what I talked about…] What is the soundtrack to your life? Even if you don’t have an answer, you understand the question – because every …
The heart of the system
I spend a fair amount of time at events and in meetings where people talk about innovation – theirs and others – and try to uncover new ideas for business and technology. One of the questions that’s asked rather a lot is, “Where do the best ideas come from?” There’s a preconceived notion, it seems, that these things come as …
Blinded by the light
This is the less selfish post that accompanies my previous one… and in many ways, the more important of the two. As I mentioned, I spoke at both Picnic and MEX last week. As a result, I came home with a head jam-packed full of awesome, and am only just now able to start sifting through the highlights. The overarching …