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 …
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 …
Singularity, Schmingularity
There are those who insist that by 2045 we will have achieved the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence will have surpassed our own. This may be the case, but then again it may not be. In the 1960s there were those who thought they could crack AI in one summer. What’s interesting about the AI debate is… well, a lot. But one …
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 …
Indispensably Useless (the value of art)
In September, I spoke at Retune13, at the behest of the lovely Ms. Marguerite Joly. My talk was on a topic I don’t touch on all that often but which is hugely meaningful to me: art. Specifically, my brief was to talk about the value of art, to try to address the question of what makes good work. I’ve spoken …