Over the past several years, I’ve been engaged with the startup community on a bunch of levels – mentor, interim C suite, sounding board, product/experience/design consultant. At the same time I’ve been honing and documenting the Superhuman toolkit, which contains frameworks for addressing a range of issues that most (if not all) businesses face at some point. And since I …
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 …
Conversing with ghosts [post 45/100]
Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned sometimes. A friend who’s got teenage daughters tells me that these days it’s considered ok (by some) to carry on a conversation while fiddling with one’s mobile. This still is definitely not ok in my circles, and no matter how much I apologise I always feel terrible when something comes up that I feel I …
Bring on the noise [post 44/100]
How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …
An idol by any other name… [post 43/100]
The rationalists have been gaining ground rapidly over the past couple of decades. Atheism is, increasingly, equated with intellectualism*. At the same time (and probably not unrelated) we are surrounded by and immersed in technology more than ever, and more every day. We are urged and encouraged to believe in the progress of science and technology as the route to …
FOR SALE: Me. Good condition. Convenience ONO. [post 42/100]
[This article was written for Prophecy and is cross-posted here with permission.] We are addicted to technology. Literally. Cognitive scientists have found the same kind of dopamine response in smartphone users checking Facebook as in gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine, or junkies getting high. And we know it. We now have resorts where you can pay to …
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 …
Behold, the robot… invasion? [posts 27-28/100]
This week is MEX15, always a fun event but particularly so for me this time, as I was invited not only to speak but to facilitate some creative sessions with the goal of producing some design principles around my topic, which is robots. Since I’m pretty deeply engaged with what’s happening here, this post will have to stand for yesterday …