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 …
Arbitrary targets, arbitrary decisions [GIGO is alive and well]
Yesterday I read an article in the New York Times about goal-oriented behaviour and its pros and cons in marathon running and personal finance. It’s a good piece. But this line, toward the end, really grabbed me: “Goals can be useful when they motivate us to perform better, but they’re harmful when focusing on arbitrary targets leads to arbitrary decisions.” Does that seem …
Your life as a cyborg superhero
A few weeks I did a workshop with this title at Frontiers of Interaction. This was not about dressing up as Seven of Nine or the Terminator; this was about getting people thinking differently about technology, design, the things we all make. I’m as enamoured with shiny new toys as the next person (probably more so than most), but that’s not …
What price success? (a note on corporate ethics)
Last week I spoke at FOM12, and the closing question was a proper BOOM. The questioner asked whether I think it’s inherently wrong for businesses to use personal data to target products, ads and content. I found myself saying, “It comes down to ethics.” It felt a little weird to say that, although I was gratified to see a few …
The heart of the system
I spend a fair amount of time at events and in meetings where people talk about innovation – theirs and others – and try to uncover new ideas for business and technology. One of the questions that’s asked rather a lot is, “Where do the best ideas come from?” There’s a preconceived notion, it seems, that these things come as …