In 2018 I was doing work on Forgetting in design. This was mostly due to a mix of work in Dementia and human centered design concerns about the demand for Memorability made by some products and services. I’ve come back to this diagram due to work updating the SensoryUX workshop I have been running since […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
The Mona Lisa on my mantlepiece
The Mona Lisa arrived at our house today. It has taken time to get here. I asked for it a year ago at my neighbourhood well and then there were many conversations around the well to understand why I needed the original painting. Wouldn’t a jpeg or a printed poster be enough? was the main […]
The Community – design fiction for new economies
I wrote a short story about a future without money. You can read it on this blog The Mona Lisa On My Mantelpiece. This post is just a few notes on some of the framing devices and ideas behind the story. This is just a few notes for a design fiction on future economies. It […]
System Blame Judo
Taking responsibility is hard. Organisations, like private corporations and governments, have however, found a way of avoiding that responsibility and that hard work. It is a form of judo. Using the weight and momentum of the issue and flipping it so it ends up being transferred to someone else. In System Blame Judo it is the responsibility […]
Protected: Codesign – starting with uncertainty
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The Gap in Codesign
This is prototype for a workshop for young people who are starting a new cultural codesign project. I have 90 minutes to offer some advice. What I hope to do is: validate their feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability and show they are strengths offer some skills on communicating better and thinking about wellbeing and self-care […]
Alignment: linking movement and thought
Alignment has been coming up in a lot of my reading over the last year. In books on Wayfinding, Time Perception, Dissent, Kindness and Leadership it’s the anchor of alignment that comes thru as a common theme. The need to be aligned at the start of a project or journey but also the need to […]
TIME: planning workshop activities
This post is about Time and Activities in workshops. How to think critically of time allocated to the different elements of activities that workshop participants find value in. Pre-Activity Instructions Question: how long does it take to explain the workshop activity? Explaining what an activity is, what its outputs are to be and how it […]
Designing Hybrid Workshops in 3 Parts
I hope to run a free 2 hour workshop by Zoom on ideas around designing hybrid workshops at the end of September (probably Friday 24th). I’ll update information as it becomes clearer. This post is to describe the purpose and structure of the workshop. Sharing Wonder The opening of the workshop is not part of […]
3 ways of thinking about accessibility
3 concepts There are multiple ways of thinking about designing for accessibility from a person-centred perspective. This post is about 3 of them. There is this slidedeck on Dropbox for a workshop to discuss them. All the images in this post are from it. I’ll use examples from a workshop this week about communication impairments. […]