Designers often focus on creating visually appealing solutions and invitations but overlook some critical human needs: the desires for clear boundaries and meaningful welcomes. Humans are boundary-seekers. We all need to understand the edges of our environment to feel safe and oriented. Without clear boundaries, people become disoriented. Remember Doomscrolling: that endless social media scrolling, […]
Nobody wants to know the Theory of Change
Making expert competency explicit is good but that does not mean people want to know the specifics. Meeting today about climate collapse and community responses. The volunteers have created a system-based response to both loss of environment and of political structures. It’s very good. However, when trying to invite and involve new people, it’s too […]
Ask Questions clearly in Civic Assemblies
The hard work of Civic Assembly projects is getting institutions to actually think about questions that are answerable and actionable. There is no point starting out on a project that will provide no additional clarity or which will never have any actual consequences. In setting the question(s), the institution must ask itself how it will […]
The Commons – Naming but not Owning
Since the Festival of Commoning in Stroud, I’ve been to events about community land ownership in the town and used community asset spaces for parties and group meetings, and yet I still can’t quite communicate the idea of Commons. The Stroud event still left a hole in my understanding. I understand corporate/community ownership. There is […]
Human Denying Design
These words from a talk by Marc Andreessen seem to summarise something about Silicon Valley and its core ideas of design. That he thinks that reality is a failure, that lived and embodied reality is privileged. It’s ghastly. It’s Human Denying Design (HDD). It’s ignores or obliterates the history of humanity. Humanity that has used […]
Horizontal or vertical perspectives on history?
It was lovely to meet Jason Mesut again at PaperCamp on Saturday. This is a quick diagram from our chat about how the tech industry orientates its sense of history. The horizontal view makes everything seem likes a coherent linear process. A timeline of development of tools and methods that pass from one generation to […]
Building a better relationship with AI?
I spoke yesterday at the Content Design Club meetup about accessibility and humane design. There is one part of the talk I want to highlight in this post. It is about borrowing and lending. Technologies borrow human capacities to create capabilities that they then present back to human users. Reciprocation as society Borrowing and lending […]
Human(e) Centred Content Design
I was invited to give a Pep Talk to the Content Design Club yesterday. I spoke about accessibility, gaps, kindness and agency. I also added a bit about Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the end. This video is a version of that talk. It has subtitles added using MixCaptions app. Happy to chat about the issues […]
The Imperialization of Maths
I just finished Kelly Clancy’s Playing With Reality. It is very good for many reasons but I want to just concentrate on the word Imperialization that occurs four times in the book. The book is concerned with the ideas of games and how we perceive and move thru reality. The ideas of Game Theory and […]
Post Normal and Dissent
After giving the latest version of my Post Normal Design talk at CampDigital this year, I made some new cards. This post is two videos explaining what they are for. Being loud and quiet Dissent and Mattering Contact me if you are interested Do contact me if you are interested in this subject and if […]