Acuity Design

Much news about UK government and #AI today. The Guardian had this summary. What this reminds me of is how 18th century governments were hypnotised by the idea of humans as machines in a mechanistic universe. The Mechanical Turk The Mechanical Turk con is well known and still relevant but what is often missed is […]

19th century had major technical and scientific advances but also a whole lot of weird BS like Spiritualism and Telepathy. In expanding a space of future possibilities with real innovation, it appears you also always create a grifting weird BS space. The magical thinking is inevitable consequence of new thinking. Metaphorical space is tricky In […]

Facebook yesterday declared that it was eliminating fact checking and moving content safety staff from California to Texas. In doing so, it declared that it was explicitly becoming an unsafe and untruthful place. A place that supported abuse and coercion by not having any guardrails using its power and privilege (community notes have neither). With […]

Having finished Disaster Nationalism (which I’d recommend as way of framing and phrasing the authoritarian populist attacks on democracy), I wonder about how we can intervene and divert people off the radicalisation pipeline of Resentment, Responsibility and Revenge. Civic Assemblies? From experience lately with civic assembly and deliberation methods, I’d say they could be used […]

Apple Intelligence was helping someone steal my payment details today. In my emails this morning, one had a Priority sticker added with the message that I should deal with it to stop service disruption. It was apparently from Weebly, a website hosting company which I have used in the past. It was early, Apple had […]

In 2024, I learned that civic assemblies succeed not through technology, but through simple tools that give people consequential voice. While tech companies pushed AI solutions, I watched real change happen through paper cards and human conversation. What I did • Developed new frameworks for civic assembly facilitation in UK and Germany • Created deliberation […]

I’ve been designing and facilitating a few new forms of consultation events this year. Mostly I have used a Civic Assembly (CA) format. These types of assembly are trending at the moment as a way of ‘fixing’ the democratic deficit where there seems to be a disconnect between professional politics and people. The disconnect that […]

I posted about micronaming in landscapes that often happens when people do not use maps and would like to clarify how this differs from the technological methodology of atomisation. Information Architecture and labelling Atomisation is something that Information Architecture can get trapped by. The ideal of clarity thru defining and naming elements becoming a spiral […]

We went for 1/2 day walking workshop around the Heavens valley area of Stroud today. This tour was an archaeological trip around the area as a fundraiser for the community purchase of the land. The map as spreadsheet The starting point of the tour was a 1690’s map of the land and its subdivisions into […]

I use a lot of play and experiential activities in workshops I design and facilitate but seriousness has come up lately in public consultation and civic assembly work. I think it’s because, unlike codesign or participatory design, there is no specific lived/living experience element to this work. Everyone is in the room because they are, […]