Yesterday, I wrote about the material I am developing for a public workshop in Stroud. That was about one side of the main handout. You can read Asking Not Taking about autonomy, saying No and Keeping. This post is about the flipside. This is about what the participants take home and what they do next. […]

I am probably doing an outdoors workshop for Transition Stroud in September. The general theme is change in the town and there is an underlying theme of the climate crisis. It is a hope-based event. I asked to do a new version of the Affirmation, Imagination, Invitation workshop that I have previously run at UX […]

The three core principles of citizens’ assembliesA CA [Citizen Assembly] is a participatory institution which brings together an inclusive group of lay citizens to engage in deliberation on a public issue so as to exert a public influence. CAs hence rely on three core principles: deliberation, inclusion and public influence. Julien Vrydagh(University of Stuttgart) I […]

The replication crisis in social research is ongoing and there was an interesting paper mentioned last week on some related issues. The paper is The replication crisis as mere indicator of two fundamental misalignments and it is concerned with both the methodology issues and the anthropological issues. It is the latter that interest me. The […]

Designing for Autonomy is critical to accessibility. Enabling people to do the thing they want, with the amount of assistance they choose. Personal intent and agency mixed together. What can happen tho is that, in the rush to deliver frictionless usability, the ability to say No disappears. Many products and services support Automy. Autonomy with […]

Originally published 26/11/2018 I have helped to run a few amateur drama groups in different towns over the years and they are now strangely skewed in their membership. They’re full of old members (over 65) and young members (under 20) – the middle is missing. The middle is missing because people are at work and […]

Just on Systems Thinking, there is quite a lot of criticism of the Labour victory in the UK General Election based on ‘% of vote’ statistics. This is not helpful or meaningful tho. The UK has a First Past The Post (FPTP) system of elections not a Proportional Representation (PR) system. ‘% of vote’ is […]

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force at the end of June 2025. What I hope for is that it does not get trapped by the idea that accessibility in design, products and service is about standards that can be managed thru checklists. This trap has led to many years of ‘technically’ accessible but […]

This is a post created by serendipity of encountering two new pieces of media at the same time. I finished reading Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons and watched the latest episode of Disney+ Star Wars series The Acolyte last night. This post is simply about reacting to the content of both and how they crossover […]

I’ve been working on Cognitive Accessibility projects over the last couple of years and how to enable open conversations about personal capacity without losing personal autonomy keeps coming up. Asking people to talk of their own capabilities and how the environment around them (both architectural and social) affects them is hard. It exists on a […]