Archive

Apocalypse!!!!! How Not to be An Idiot Designing Climate Futures

We real­ly seem to indulge in dystopi­an think­ing. And we love it. And I real­ly won­der why that hap­pens. I don’t know how you feel about this, but it real­ly stress­es me out. And it kind of both­ers me that it’s still a lot of times eas­i­er to imag­ine the end of the world than how we could live on a sus­tain­able planet. 

Computer, Stop
Why Star Trek only goes so far and we need to try harder than science fiction

Star Trek’s vision of a voice inter­face to com­put­ing was and remains incred­i­bly com­pelling. So much to the extent that about three years ago, Amazon includ­ed Computer” as a wake word to the Echo so that we can pre­tend to talk to the first mass-market voice assis­tant as if we’re on a space­ship in the 24th century. 

Austerity as a Service
Human-Centered Design for Climate Mitigation and Resilience

As a human-centered design­er what is my role, what is our role, in this kind of big­ger pic­ture? If this is the dom­i­nant lens of soci­ety, what’s our contribution? 

In Praise of Discomfort

For an expe­ri­ence to be mem­o­rable let alone trans­for­ma­tive, the human brain has to be pushed out of default auto-pilot mode into con­scious thought. And that push nec­es­sar­i­ly involves some lev­el of discomfort.

(Data) Trust is the New Oil
Redesigning the data economy to optimize for trust

The pow­er of data has nev­er been big­ger than it is today and I think this can be a great thing, even though it is also cre­at­ing some exis­ten­tial risks.