I was at the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) annual meeting in UK on Saturday. This post is about the ideas and conversations raised in one session: Co-write the Future with Al – facilitated by Hideyuki Yoshioka and Linmin Zhang. The Terminal Decline slide above is from their presentation and gives some sense of the […]
AI as Cognitive Ramp
The use of ramps, instead of stairs, made the physical environment accessible. Destinations could be reached. Agency enabled. Personal capacities matched with better institutional capabilities. Artificial Intelligence (Al) offers the possibility of a cognitive equivalent. Intents and journeys that were blocked by complexity and complication smoothed out. New ideas and new skills accessible as the […]
Breach – transgression not empathy in design
BREACH is something I think about when people are talking about using empathy, codesign and living experience in design projects. It’s a word from China Mieville’s The City and The City. It’s a terrible offence in an imaginary city where two communities, two cultures, two groups of people live in the same physical space but […]
Beyond Marketing: Designing Invitations and Welcomes in Cultural Organisations
In cultural organisations, we tend to treat the beginning of an initiative as a marketing challenge. A new exhibition, public programme, co-creation project, or community partnership appears on the horizon and we focus on the invite: the campaign, the poster, the carefully crafted press release. If the numbers at the door look good, we assume the […]
On the efficient product management of Panto
I went to our local Panto tonight. For the non-UK reader, panto is short for pantomime and it is theatre show for kids that also has risqué jokes for adults. It generally follows a fairy story, like Cinderella or Snow White, but can have British historical characters, like Robin Hood or Dick Whittington. All roles […]
Three What If’s for 2026
This is a post based on books and ideas I encountered in 2025 that I want to take into 2026. This is mostly about hope and community but starts with regret and resentment. What if…you felt both regret and hope? I started 2025 reading Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism. It is a good book on how […]
Min/Max of Hope and Agency
I am just prototyping a zine about Hope and Agency. The idea of Min/Max as a way of expending and extending Hope and Agency is based on a dream. I am trying to better form the ideas in ways that are clear and can be communicated well.
Touchscreens do not work by touch alone
Car makers are switching back to physical buttons per Wired magazine. You can read the article ‘Rejoice! Carmakers Are Embracing Physical Buttons Again’. Tactile overlays We did a load of work about 10 years ago with tactile overlays in museums when touchscreens started coming out and, in particular, iPad and iPod Touch came out. This […]
Clear/Mix at the start
A community project start is delayed so I have some materials building up and this is a post sharing one of them. Three workshops for a community The community development project is using workshops to explore where people are now and where they hope to be. From my experience with both civic assemblies and hopeful […]
Anxious Conversations?
Could Anxious Conversations be a useful process like Active Listening? How do we provide a structure for thinking about what is stressful to a person and how to establish some mutual rules on how to stop/start conversation? I am wondering about new workshop tools after finishing Naomi Alderman’s book ‘Don’t burn anyone at the stake […]