Archive

Designing for Data Literacy in the Age of Post-Truth

We should use our tool­box to make com­plex­i­ty under­stand­able. We need to use the tools at our dis­pos­al to build data lit­er­a­cy by show­ing the con­text that data exists in. Because with that data, and with con­text around the data, we’ll be able to build understanding…

The Oppenheimer Moment

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good intentions.

AI and Human Development

Increasingly we’re using auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy in ways that kind of sup­port humans in what they’re doing rather than just hav­ing algo­rithms work on their own, because they’re not smart enough to do that yet or deal with unex­pect­ed situations.

Everybody Knows When You’re Talking To Your Mother

You have to think with your users, with your cus­tomers, what is your actu­al rela­tion­ship? Are they your gods? Are they your guests? Are they a nui­sance to you? Because you know where the pow­er is. 

When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives

I won­der with all these vary­ing lev­els of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives dig­i­tal­ly and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a pub­lic network?