slow thoughts

  • The Future of Design Education is Soft and Squishy

    A sponge maximises surface area to build capacity for absorption. We should try to be more sponge-like.

  • Redundancy Reconsidered

    We somehow appreciate the inherent comedy in how engineers systematically over-provision, create fallbacks, fail-safes and redundancies at every possible corner.

  • Dear Apple, Here Are Three Things I’d Like You to Fix With Contacts

    Apple’s contact management app represents a glaring blind spot both in terms of functionality and user experience. That’s ironic given that the company’s marketing always revolves around connecting people.

  • Why We Keep Referencing The Past To Feel Good About the Future, or: A Brief History of Skeuomorphism

    Why did the disciples of Bauhaus love to hate Parisian metro stations? And is VR really virtual?

  • The Automation Paradox

    The shift from nitty gritty to ever more elevated levels of abstractions has been a trend in technology for so long, that it almost seems inevitable. But some of the most interesting pieces of technology I see coming out of the labs, are extremely close to the machine. Starting from first principles, these teams go slow. They don’t stand on the shoulder of giants, they carefully lay out the foundations for whole new paradigms. I think in the end, that’s the only way real innovation can happen.

  • Excellent Engineering Won’t Keep You From Solving the Wrong Problem

    Teams like this can follow the tenants of XP and agile to the letter, and still end up building the wrong product. Teams like this need tools on a whole different level. Entire problem spaces need to be explored, before discrete problems are picked out to be solved.

  • Defining Done

    The tail end of any experience is disproportionally important to how we look back at the whole, but endings are also tricky business; how do you know when you’re done?

  • What I Think About When I Think About Design

    There are basically two modes of problem solving that are in wide spread use simply because of how we organise schools: Analysis, and decision making. According to Design Thinking, these two modes of problem solving fall short when addressing the increasingly complex challenges facing society. We need a complementary attack angle.