[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 …
Grandma’s internet refrigerator [post 36/100]
Since it’s International IoT Day today, I thought I’d write something about… IoT. The other day, Alex Deschamps-Sonsino tweeted something that’s been tugging at the corner of my mind since I read it: As usual, I agree wholeheartedly (with all 5 of her points), but this one resonates for a reason that might or might not be what she intended …
Getting it together (the important business of cross-platform design) [post 35/100]
Remember the old days of design for mobile? I mean before the iPhone, when all we had were dumbphones and WAP? That was a gigantic pain in the arse. Screens were tiny, data connections were slow, touch screens were nonexistent. We had to very carefully select which portions of a web site we’d offer in the WAP version – if …
Waste not, want not (the mystery of the design-resistant startup) [post 25/100]
One of the students in the session I taught on Wednesday night – a super-bright 21 year old working for a startup – said he’s grown frustrated with the attitudes in the startup community, which always seem to demand a quite narrow “value proposition” defined more in business terms than in human terms. I’ve noticed this too of course, and …
Aspiration: Master or Mimbo? [post 14/100]
Yes, I know, I missed posting yesterday. I’ll make it up to you over the weekend. Anyway, I’ve been continuing to have conversations with people in the creative and technology industries about avoiding techno-dystopia. And as I was discussing this with a friend who doesn’t work in that domain (yes, I have them, shut up), something occurred to me that …
Hunter/gatherers in the 21st century [post 13/100]
Autocorrect failure. Bad recommendations. Offensive ‘related’ content. These are a few of our least favourite things (except in a schadenfreude kind of way). And the frustration we feel comes from the fact that they are all drawing conclusions – the wrong conclusions. It doesn’t help that quite often, we aren’t given adequate means to correct them. A colleague sent me …
You keep using that word: AI and false expectations [post 12/100]
In this wonderful world of technology, we’ve made up lots of words. That’s natural, since we’ve made up lots of new things as well. But sometimes we make up a word and we use it over and over again, even though the word doesn’t really describe the thing that we’re talking about. It reminds me of one of my favourite …
Re-revolution [post 11/100]
Last autumn, some very nice folks from Freunde von Freunden got in touch and invited me to be a part of the Deutsche Bank Stories series. They sent round a very professional and also very fun crew, and despite the fact that I was getting over a bad flu and therefore both sounded and rather looked like something the Swamp …
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 …