I just finished a project with the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK and one thing that came up was how to shift teams and projects into alternative patterns of participatory design. The tools for such design are well known but how to access them from existing structures and then integrate them into new […]

Floating Bus Stops represent what I distrust about Inclusive Design processes (compared to Accessible Design methods). I was reminded by a speech this week by Lord Holmes (who is blind) in the House of Lords about the dangers of such bus stop designs for blind and visually impaired people. Accessible issues Accessible Design has issues. […]

I was running a workshop on imagining futures for a German museum last week. We walked around the building and spent a lot of time going down long corridors (and back again). When we stopped, we stood. Museums can be strangely loathe to enable visitor comfort. It is like a version of Defensive Architecture: the […]

This is a page for people attending the workshop remotely but it may be helpful to anyone in the room too. Thanks for coming along. This page has some some questions to look at and materials for you to download (and print if you want). This workshop is being held in a cinema so, for […]

I have just started a new project with a German museum. They have sent me their strategic and visitor engagement plans in a couple of PowerPoint slidedecks. I have used Google Translate to try and understand what is being communicated in my own language of English. This machine-translation is very useful but also useless. Whilst […]

On Threads, Rotomonkey, a professional Environmental Technical Artist, has critiqued this new Sora generative AI video clip. Not so much on the realism of it, but on the usability of the AI system within a production process of image imagination, option creating and editing of possibilities. The mixture of art and management that underlies the […]

This is a post about sharing images and text as something humans have done for centuries for personal wellbeing. The current period has led to greater capacity to make and share but the underlying intent is deeply embedded into humans and their societies. This is a sketch diagram I wrote last night simply to connect […]

Starting with Marshmallows The Marshmallow Test is most often used to deride children and their current, and possibly future, self control. However, there is also something else in the research. When children were allowed to talk to a parent/care giver before the test and they said how great the kid was and how good their […]

I am reading The Revolutionary Temper by Robert Darnton. It is a history book about the popular experience of the pre-French Revolution period. It is an odd book in a sense that it is about tracing and tracking how sentiment shifted in Paris as events occured. This is done by researching poems, songs and pamphlets […]

Working on a transit hub wayfinding map at the moment and they have fallen for an old information architecture mistake in physical space and human centred design terms. When you only work with top-down 2d maps and whiteboards, it is easy for the system-view (the God view) to become the information orientation. However, that then […]