The only thing we have to fear…

Image of man leaping across a wide gap

It’s ok to be scared. There is a prevailing sentiment out there that fear is a sign of weakness, but the truth is, fear can be a productive thing. Understanding our fears and engaging with them is the healthy way to move forward. Cancerland taught me a lot about fear: about my own, which was abject and all-consuming at first; …

‘Why’ beats ‘what’

Photo of calipers

How are you doing?  I’m still not dead yet. But that doesn’t tell you anything useful about how I’m doing – I might be scaling mountains at the weekend; I might be bed-bound and miserable. ‘Not dead yet’ doesn’t tell you much – just like a company’s revenue, margin and active users don’t reveal all that much about how they’re …

Design Thinking: the Baby vs. the Bathwater

Photo of a drain emptying with swirling water

There’s a lot of talk around here lately about ‘the Death of Design Thinking’ as IDEO goes through a massive round of layoffs and restructuring. “Is Design Thinking dead?” everyone is asking, and for a lot of people the answer seems to be an enthusiastic YES. But there is a big difference between Design Thinking(TM), a specific service offered and …

Cake or Death

Lemon poppyseed cake photo by James Ransom

Can we all agree that how we experience the world is important?  So why do so many businesses still see experience design as an optional extra? This has come across my desk often enough this week for me to feel a need to post about it. Too many designers are still fighting for the right to do the jobs they …

Shared realities: the ontology of tech

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had cause to do some thinking about Voice Assistance Technology, specifically what kind of ‘personality’ these things should have. When the topic was first raised, my instinctive response was that it was the wrong question. It took some further mulling and conversation to work out exactly why. TL;DR: in order for trust – and, by …

Sharing, shmaring [part 2/2]

In my last post, I went on about how the ’sharing economy’ is a misnomer that distracts from what’s really going on. This time, I’m going to talk about the impact that distraction can have. Businesses that enable peer-to-peer commerce can have a huge positive impact, as I wrote last time. They enable people to ingeniously fill gaps in the …

Sharing, shmaring [part 1/2]

Happy New Year, people. I’ve got a backlog of partially-written pieces from 2015 that I plan to foist upon you in the coming months, on a somewhat more realistic schedule than the long-abandoned ‘100 posts in 100 days’. They’re likely to be mostly long reads, so settle in and make yourself comfortable. —— I’m generally not a big fan of …

Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]

[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …

False prophets [post 48/100]

Aaaaand we’re back. Please excuse the break – life very much got in the way and trust me, taking a break was way better than the schlock I would have been churning out if I’d forced myself to post every day. Then again, maybe this is schlock too. You’ll have to be the judge, dear reader. Anyway. Onward. A couple …

Little mysteries [post 47/100]

This morning I updated my iPhone to the latest version of iOS. About an hour later, I left for the airport. My phone was in my jacket pocket, as usual. My headphones were in and I was listening to music on Spotify, as usual. Only this time everything got a bit weird. First, the music started pausing, unpausing, jumping a …