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 …
The only thing we have to fear…
It’s ok to be scared. There is a prevailing sentiment out there that fear is a sign of weakness, but the truth is, fear can be a productive thing. Understanding our fears and engaging with them is the healthy way to move forward. Cancerland taught me a lot about fear: about my own, which was abject and all-consuming at first; …
‘Why’ beats ‘what’
How are you doing? I’m still not dead yet. But that doesn’t tell you anything useful about how I’m doing – I might be scaling mountains at the weekend; I might be bed-bound and miserable. ‘Not dead yet’ doesn’t tell you much – just like a company’s revenue, margin and active users don’t reveal all that much about how they’re …
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 …
Introducing Superventions
Over the past several years, I’ve been engaged with the startup community on a bunch of levels – mentor, interim C suite, sounding board, product/experience/design consultant. At the same time I’ve been honing and documenting the Superhuman toolkit, which contains frameworks for addressing a range of issues that most (if not all) businesses face at some point. And since I …
Sharing, shmaring [part 2/2]
In my last post, I went on about how the ’sharing economy’ is a misnomer that distracts from what’s really going on. This time, I’m going to talk about the impact that distraction can have. Businesses that enable peer-to-peer commerce can have a huge positive impact, as I wrote last time. They enable people to ingeniously fill gaps in the …
Sharing, shmaring [part 1/2]
Happy New Year, people. I’ve got a backlog of partially-written pieces from 2015 that I plan to foist upon you in the coming months, on a somewhat more realistic schedule than the long-abandoned ‘100 posts in 100 days’. They’re likely to be mostly long reads, so settle in and make yourself comfortable. —— I’m generally not a big fan of …