Designing and delivering your own workshop can be daunting. The mixture of design questions (like What is being taught? How can people learn? How do we share?) and facilitation questions (like How do we invite and welcome people? How do we create trust and safety?) can be a complicated mess. This post is about a […]
Writing a (photo) book
I design and facilitate a lot of different workshops. The last few years of hybrid and fully virtual workshops has meant I have adjusted a lot of ways I work. One thing I have added is physical versions of the content, like cards sent to participants. This was to try and avoid the horror of […]
Social Stories and Guided Reminiscence in museums & cultural places
Museums and other cultural places (like libraries and cafes) are excellent spaces for enabling people’s abilities to recall and share memories. This practice can be particularly beneficial for older adults and people with memory impairments like dementia. Using Guided Reminiscence, we can use the sensory environment and experiences of the present to recall personal and […]
Design is invisible
“Good design is invisible” is a fairly smug cliché among designers. Affordance It is based on the idea of Affordance. The idea that some design can be so intuitive, so obvious that people just use the product or service. They do not notice it as they benefit from it. However, there is a flip side […]
Bad words to describe new ideas
Sometimes when trying to explain a new idea it is good to use a diagram or an analogy. People understand things when they are positioned in ways that link to their existing mental models or knowledge. Sometimes. I also use neologisms. New words that can sit inside a sentence. They are not necessarily pretty words […]
4 O’s – mapping a project check in
I was asked to chat to a manager today about where they are in an ongoing project and whether there was any way I could be helpful. I know nothing about the project and very little about the organisation’s processes, methodologies and culture. So I needed a way of framing the short conversation and understanding […]
Wayfinding in places and projects
I use a simple framework when planning wayfinding projects. It is called ABCD. Alignment Boundaries Centered Direction You can learn a lot about the framework in the 30 minute talk I gave at Webexpo 2022 in Prague. The following link has both video of me talking and the slides – Successful Journeys. A new workshop […]
Spending time together, positively at EuroIA
I am glad to be running a new workshop at EuroIA conference in Marseille at the end of September. You can read about the conference, all the workshops and talks, and buy tickets (there are only 100) on their website EuroIA22. I now try to provide pre-workshop information to prospective participants and this post explains […]
I know things but should I speak up?
I have made some new stickers and cards for the workshops I facilitate. They are deliberately pointy to force participants to think about how they value their own knowledge and the knowledge of people they are sharing a time and place with. I am going to use this post to explain why I think I […]
Accessibility enables autonomy – a project example
These are some tactile and Braille interpretation materials for a new English Heritage project – read about it in this Guardian article. It was a fairly low budget project that needed fast delivery so all elements were kept simple in design terms. However, the key point is that we made multiple pieces of media to […]