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 […]
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Music, memory and protest
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 […]
The God View trap
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 […]
Somewhere to put your dreams and fears
This is a post about making and offering accessible maps but, more fundamentally, it is about creating a space for people to put their dreams and fears. Humans create cognitive maps within themselves. They imagine, learn and perceive so much and need some way of creating patterns to find meaning and intention for action. This […]
FAQ knows
This is quick post about wayfinding and FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) webpages. There is a lot wrong in the above diagram I drew during a BlueSky chat but, as with most of the artefacts I make, it’s an attempt to clarify to myself a few questions and to try and provoke some answers from people […]
Engineering Design in Climate Crisis
This is a short post about a model for talking about design in the climate crisis. The complete diagram is complicated so I will work thru the elements and build up the meanings I am trying to communicate. Hope and Energy are critical themes. The underlying mechanism is Permaculture and having a sense of direction […]
Do Personas block Systemic Change?
It is the political party conference season in the UK. Each party gets a week to meet up and get media attention for their policies (especially important this year with a General Election due in 2024). The Conservative Party has spent some time preparing with announcements that cut back Climate Crisis policies and cancel pro-Net […]
IXDD23 and equitable design models
It is IXDD (World Interaction Day) today. A day about interaction design and the theme this year is Ethics, Equity, +Responsibility. I have used some of the content from my talk at Accessibility Scotland a few weeks ago to talk about bias in models. The core issue is that we cannot enable equitable spaces if […]
Pick a layer: centring on which sense of our humanity?
After a few months of work for the Design Council on Systemic Design Thinking in the Climate Crisis, I am back on a museum wayfinding project. We are about to test a prototype scheme and I need to think about what questions to ask. As with Systemic Design Thinking, there are issues of choosing the […]
Accessibility And…
I was invited to speak at Accessibility Scotland last week. Someone had to drop out and they needed a quick replacement. I was glad to help out. Update You can watch the original talk now on Vimeo. I needed to write a new talk quickly tho. I prefer to run workshops to explore problems but […]