Last week I made mention of poor recommendations by way of suggesting that we should maybe stop trying to draw conclusions about everything all the time. This time I want to point out another facet of the problem. I’ve written before about Big Data and the general meaninglessness of that term. Still one of my favourite quotes from 2013 was …
Aspiration: Master or Mimbo? [post 14/100]
Yes, I know, I missed posting yesterday. I’ll make it up to you over the weekend. Anyway, I’ve been continuing to have conversations with people in the creative and technology industries about avoiding techno-dystopia. And as I was discussing this with a friend who doesn’t work in that domain (yes, I have them, shut up), something occurred to me that …
Hunter/gatherers in the 21st century [post 13/100]
Autocorrect failure. Bad recommendations. Offensive ‘related’ content. These are a few of our least favourite things (except in a schadenfreude kind of way). And the frustration we feel comes from the fact that they are all drawing conclusions – the wrong conclusions. It doesn’t help that quite often, we aren’t given adequate means to correct them. A colleague sent me …
You keep using that word: AI and false expectations [post 12/100]
In this wonderful world of technology, we’ve made up lots of words. That’s natural, since we’ve made up lots of new things as well. But sometimes we make up a word and we use it over and over again, even though the word doesn’t really describe the thing that we’re talking about. It reminds me of one of my favourite …
Re-revolution [post 11/100]
Last autumn, some very nice folks from Freunde von Freunden got in touch and invited me to be a part of the Deutsche Bank Stories series. They sent round a very professional and also very fun crew, and despite the fact that I was getting over a bad flu and therefore both sounded and rather looked like something the Swamp …
Something something systems thinking, part 2 [post 10/100]
Last week I opened the topic of the growing challenge for designers. I’d like to get a bit deeper into that now. Hank commented on that post and he and I had a conversation on the topic a few months ago over a pint. The example I used at the time was a set of interconnected mobile services, but you …
La la la la la can’t hear you! (or, when personalisation really sucks) [post 9/100]
There’s a bit of synchronicity of ideas going on today. A friend and co-conspirator in Superhuman is working on an interaction model that’s heavily driven by personalisation. And this morning, I was linked (thanks, Tom!) to an article about where the Nest experience went terribly wrong for Kara Pernice, one of its (former) users. These two things share a critical …
The Clarified Self [post 8/100]
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 …