// Information Appliances
Every function a device can perform is something your brain has to hold open as a possibility.
A short one about Jef Raskin, the Canon Cat, and why a device that only does one thing asks less of you than one that does everything.
Also: a language with only one variable, a phone that used to do one thing at a time, and the iPod again.
// The Discipline of No
More money was supposed to buy better decisions. Mostly it buys the excuse to skip making one.
A short one about Seth Godin, Yahoo’s homepage, and why more resources should mean fewer decisions, not more products.
Also: a search box with nothing else on it, a company that said yes to everything, and the part of the job that doesn’t scale with funding.
// System Personas and UCD
An AI agent doesn’t care about your brand guidelines. It cares whether you’re useful. And how efficient.
User-centered design gets a new kind of user. Not a persona you write for a user, a system standing in the queue as one.
Also: screen readers, search spiders, and a word the web has been using since the nineties without noticing what it meant.
// Emoticomp Revisited
I wrote about giving machines personality fifteen years before any of them could actually talk back.
Emoticomp again, this time asking what held up and what didn’t, now that every AI product on earth has a personality whether it wanted one or not.
Also: what I got right, what I got backwards, and the one thing I didn’t see coming at all.
// System Personas
I called it a system persona in 2011. Now I call it a CLAUDE.md file.
A short one. On rereading an old post and realising I already had the answer, over a decade before I needed it.
Also: what an object wants, and why an AI agent needs to know.
// Imagining the Traffic Jam
Technology has no inevitable trajectory.
Last of five, following on from An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence. What we didn’t imagine when we built the attention economy, what the same question means for the intention economy, and why the destructive path is always the easier one.
Also: a toddler who can infer what you meant to do, an installation at the Venice Biennale, and the moment we all lost, one more time.
// An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence
Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product.
Fourth of five, following on from Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas. About what homogenisation does to trust, once every option looks and behaves the same, and why that makes leaving easy and staying meaningless.
Also: the same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town, enshittification, and why there’s no hook left for customer intent.
// Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas
Creativity is powered by friction.
Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod. About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say.
Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the differentiator.
// My Reconditioned iPod
I go for walks without my phone now. Just me and whatever I loaded before I left the house.
Second of five, following on from The Intention Economy. A short one, about what a deliberately limited piece of technology teaches you about choosing what you want, and a subway ad that stumbled onto the same idea by accident.
Also: a walk without a phone, a search that makes you remember the name of the thing you’re after, and a Game Boy with a heart drawn on it.
// The Intention Economy
We didn’t lose our attention. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.
First of five. This started as one post that tried to do too much. This one’s about ADHD, the attention economy, and the intention economy Doc Searls imagined in 2006, then what happened when the people running the attention economy noticed it.
Also: a misdiagnosed disorder, a search engine that built the answer then buried it, and researchers arguing over who gets to use a word.
// IDHD
We didn’t lose our attention spans. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.
A post about the attention economy, the intention economy we could have had, and what the distance between them has quietly done to creativity, trust, and the future we’re building.
Also: a reconditioned iPod, rocket boots for terrible ideas, and an ocean of artificial intelligence.
// Default Mode
I was called a daydreamer at school. It wasn’t a compliment.
I think it’s the most important skill I have. And I feel it has atrophied.
// Are You an Artist?
Two different strangers asked me the same question. I wasn’t ready for it either time.
A post about identity, creative practice, and the masks we wear to avoid answering things honestly.
Also: Supersonic festival, Halima Cassell’s ceramics, and a coffee shop conversation I’m glad I had.
// Boomkat Charts
Collecting all the Boomkat end of year charts in one convenient place. This is direct from my Obsidian vault, and in some ways is a thinly veiled SEO/AIO strategy to attract the kind of people I’d most like to be reading this blog.
“Find the others” as Timothy Leary said.
// Proof of Life
It’s been a while. Here’s where I’m at.
A long overdue check-in covering sobriety, why I’ve mostly fallen out of love with social media, and why I think the friction we’ve been so busy optimising away is often the best part.
Also: post-optimal objects, constraints, eating frogs, and a clock that tells the time in poetry.
// Event Boundaries
My dear friend Ben Lowdon sent me an Instagram reel and I’ve gone down a rabbithole.
That happens a lot. This one is good though.
// Week 21
AKA Week One.
A big week. I no longer work at Critical Mass, and am taking a bit of a break to focus on my well-being while I plan what to do next.
// Dreaming Aloud
My brain started fizzing again. I hadn’t felt that in years.
An old post, brought in from Medium. About noticing the same energy that was around from 2010 to 2014, before the NDAs closed in, and what a Turner Prize-nominated artwork in Eastbourne had to do with getting it back.
Also: a Tumblr notebook, Discordia, and a clock that started all of this.
// Awesome Accessibility
The best accessibility features don’t look like accessibility features. They just look like good design.
A short one, brought in from Medium. About a Nike shoe with a collapsible heel, and the case for building access in from the start instead of bolting it on at the end.
Also: the curb-cut effect, and why “well done, more of this” is basically the whole argument.
// Break It Till You Make It
I used to break gear on purpose.
A short one, from 2015, brought in from Medium. About pushing music equipment past what it’s meant to do, and a habit I’ve let go slack since.
Also: an Amiga loading image files as audio, and the accidents that turned out brilliant.
// Emoticomp
Give a smart object a personality and people stop being afraid of it. Get the personality wrong and it’s worse than having none.
An old post, brought in from my old journal. From January 2011, before anyone said Internet of Things out loud. About giving connected objects character, and everything that can go wrong when you try.
Also: a rabbit that couldn’t read the news, a MacBook that breathes, and fourteen rules for being polite if you’re a thing.
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