Last week I opened the topic of the growing challenge for designers. I’d like to get a bit deeper into that now. Hank commented on that post and he and I had a conversation on the topic a few months ago over a pint. The example I used at the time was a set of interconnected mobile services, but you …
La la la la la can’t hear you! (or, when personalisation really sucks) [post 9/100]
There’s a bit of synchronicity of ideas going on today. A friend and co-conspirator in Superhuman is working on an interaction model that’s heavily driven by personalisation. And this morning, I was linked (thanks, Tom!) to an article about where the Nest experience went terribly wrong for Kara Pernice, one of its (former) users. These two things share a critical …
The Clarified Self [post 8/100]
In 2012, the lovely and talented Kitty Leering asked me a question that changed the way I was thinking about rather a lot of the things I’d been thinking about. We were talking about Picnic 2012, and she asked me: “What does it mean to own yourself in the digital world?” I did a talk on the topic, and have …
Access is the new ownership, redux [post 7/100]
A couple of years ago, I did a panel at MIPCOM called “Access is the new Ownership” – it was all about how consumer attitudes to media have shifted over the years and how content owners’ business models need to follow suit. Essentially the logic goes like this: People want to watch/listen to the content they love. Most people do …
Master and servant [post 6/100]
Who’s the boss in our relationships with our technology? Over the weekend I had lunch with a friend, who told me about a client meeting he’d had last week. The client was wearing some sort of connected watch, which kept beeping and flashing alerts at him throughout the meeting, which he kept glancing at and mostly dismissing, but which still …
Skulduggery: a new frontier [post 5/100]
Next month at MEX, I’ll be doing a talk and some workshopping on designing for the IoT. I’ve been considering ways to get people thinking a bit differently, and one of them is to think about the darker side of connected objects, homes, cars and so forth. And because everyone loves a good heist/thriller/game of Cluedo, I’m going to get …
Something something systems thinking, part 1 [post 4/100]
Today’s a little crazy, not all that much time to craft a post. So I’ll open a conversation that will continue over the coming days… Lately I’ve noticed (I’m sometimes a little behind in noticing things, partly because I really don’t want them to be true) some rather alarming things about how design is carried out in companies large and …
The root of all evil? [post 3/100]
Reading Tom Armitage’s excellent piece about capitalism and the IoT (go read it, I’ll wait) made me simultaneously happy (it’s not just me!) and sad (oh god, this looks grim). But I still say it doesn’t have to be like that. And I don’t actually agree that capitalism is the problem here, exactly. I do, however, think that if we’re …
Foucault’s Robot [the digital creep factor, continued][post 2/100]
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year is why certain interactions with algorithms feel so creepy – not the annoying stuff, like the “you’ve-just-bought-this-thing-so-why-don’t-you-buy-another-one” advertising algos that are all the rage at the moment, but the things that really freak people out. Example (true story): a few years ago, after many months of …
From Abstraction to Action [first of 100 posts in 100 days]
By way of, ahem, encouragement, the lovely Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino last week challenged/shamed me into writing 100 posts in 100 days. This is 1/100. Fortunately I already had something partly written. It’s occurred to me that a lot of thought, discussion and debate goes into the talks I give (I pretty much never do the same talk twice), and yet I almost …