Last time, I wrote that we can still build our own momentum, even when things seem so out of control, and promised you some work-in-progress for my part of the I Am Not a Virus art project on COVID-related anti-Asian racism. Instead, I spent much of the last fortnight curled

There’s a climate to these times. Last month, as my companion and I walked home after dinner, a ten-year old boy in the back seat of his parents’ car yelled “HEY, CHING CHONG!” out the window as they drove past. A couple of weeks later, a crazed white woman

Through one window, the strangely beautiful remains of Coalcliff’s old industrial machinery sped past. Through the other, the ocean. I was taking the train down to the NSW South Coast, which I enjoy for its moody bluster, but that mood was broken by a loud banging at the end

Are we there yet? My dreams are usually big on Freudian metaphor, but last night’s was strangely mundane: I was running a workshop with a team of all-weather safety engineers for a major European luxury car manufacturer. These people were trying to model drivers’ needs in extreme weather scenarios,

Since each day is now indistinguishable from the last, I can pretend that it hasn’t been months since my last missive… right? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While doing that surprisingly good neoliberal business program [https://neisnow.com.au] last year, I met Ben, a brilliant young aerospace engineer. He was courting venture

Hello again. I recently visited the Australian Film, Television and Radio School for their latest Re:Frame event, which was about audience engagement in the attention economy. After just ten minutes, I wanted to stab my eyes with a pencil. Station ident: After returning to design after a year away,

The End is the Beginning is the End, as Billy Corgan suggests on the soundtrack to (what I feel is the unjustly maligned) Batman Forever. I had way too much “decline and rebirth” material to fit in the last issue, so I’ll continue to follow that seam for a

This email is powered by the trouble between metalworkers, AI, scratched CDs and the cloud. Doing strategic design, I’m always navigating tensions around narratives of change, often ostensibly involving “technology” or some desired or feared “disruption”. What do such narratives mean? Is change always good? Is there anything interesting

The scent of the future is wafting in. I’ve been breathing it in, choking on it, attempting assimilation. Over the last few weeks, I’ve enrolled in a business startup program, went to a workshop about speculative design, and thought about where I’ll be in 10 years. But

It’s a juicy weekend read for you, in defence of piety (!)… 📖📖📖 After taking an extended break from social design work “to get some perspective” (ahem), I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice, with added cultural

Oh look, I wrote a ranty thing about Facebook’s work culture of compulsory positivity. After taking an extended break from social design work “to get some perspective,” I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice, with

I’ve been catching up on all the recent bullshit about Facebook and caught this article about its workplace culture [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-performance-review-process-blamed.html] : > The company called [a] special town hall after head of policy Joel Kaplan caused an internal uproar for appearing at

After taking an extended break from social design work “to get some perspective” (ahem), I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed. Hello. You remember me. I design and critique and create tangents. You also probably remember those times you’ve incanted an everyday word, again and again, only

As a strategic design consultant I spend a large amount of my time thinking about the future. My work ranges everywhere from anticipating how social services will need to be deployed to an ageing population, to identifying the kinds of supple skills non-profits need to foster right now in order

When I’m doing deep research as part of the design process, I’m always tempted to try to create the most exhaustive model of the situation in which I’m immersed. I want to see the whole system, down to the details. What makes it tick? I start to

A designer from the Netherlands once gave a talk at our studio over lunch. Jeroen made beautiful objects in a past life as an industrial designer, but after encountering experience and service design, he gave up industrial design and ended up travelling the world, investigating how to apply user-centred design

Over the last few years, I've noticed a romantic tide of content authenticity developing across web culture. You can find it in confessional commentaries that deal with our investments in life and creative work (Merlin Mann's Cranking [http://www.43folders.com/2011/04/22/cranking] being

I flew back to Sydney last night from an out-of-town client workshop. As our plane banked over Botany Bay, I noticed for the first time that while the waves on the water’s surface were clearly visible, they looked perfectly still. The ocean looked like a piece of textured glass,

While working on a client presentation over the weekend, a fellow designer and I angsted a bit over the relative merits of presenting work in progress to clients in a descriptive form that left our thought process in the open, versus showing a more streamlined, emblematic package. We didn’t

In his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/jameson/jameson.html]”, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote that > conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt — through the figuration of advanced technology