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 […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
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. […]
Human-centered prototyping starts with respect for human capacities
When working on accessible design projects, people often centre their discussions on defining impairments and how to use technologies and services to bridge the gap between such impaired capacities and “normal” capacities. This is a deficit model of design. Design fixing human failings. What this model fails to notice is that the gap is not […]
Value Yourself: start with kindness to self
Post originally written on November 13th For World Kindness Day, sharing a tool developed for professionals involved in User Research and CoDesign workshops. Take time to value yourself so you can understand the value you can give away to others. This tool was developed in terms of CoDesign as a method of sharing skills and […]