The myth of productivity

Pretty much as long as there have been ways for people to interact online, there have been articles written about how that kind of thing is killing productivity. Email and MUD/ MUSHes were killing productivity when I was at University, then Email and the Web and IMing were killing it at work in the 90s. Lots of employers went to …

The hero with a thousand faces (thanks, Joe Campbell)

[I’ve recently been re-reading some of the work of my hero Joseph Campbell, which inspired my talk on Monday at Next Service Design in Berlin, which you can watch here. Below is (more or less) what I talked about…] What is the soundtrack to your life? Even if you don’t have an answer, you understand the question – because every …

Blinded by the light

This is the less selfish post that accompanies my previous one… and in many ways, the more important of the two. As I mentioned, I spoke at both Picnic and MEX last week. As a result, I came home with a head jam-packed full of awesome, and am only just now able to start sifting through the highlights. The overarching …

Me and my (data) shadow

I’ve been on a bit of a speaking tour the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been growing more vested in and impassioned by my current topic every time I talk about it. What I’ve been talking about is how we can become more human, better at being human, using all the richness of data and technology that we are …

Say what? (Musings on modern-day communication)

When I was growing up, there were only 3 modes of communication in common use: face to face, synchronous (phone), and asynchronous (snail mail). Email started to pick up around the time I started university, and over the next decade mostly replaced snail mail. Now, there’s a huge variety of ways to communicate, and each of us has our own private …