Category Archives: observations

Designing in the open

On Tuesday 9th of April I gave a little talk at Mozilla’s “Designing in the Open” event. Along with the rest of the speakers I was asked to prepare a 10 – 15 minutes talk and to be prepared for a discussion to follow. In preparation for the talk I spoke to a few people […]

Also posted in design | 3 Responses

Dangers of double negatives

Riding around British Columbia one can’t help but notice the posters encouraging people to either vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in an upcoming referendum. Being the curious type I have of course asked around and discussed it with a few of the locals we have encountered. As a temporary visitor any opinion I might form on […]

Also posted in inclusive design | 4 Responses

In support of students

For me, it is very simple: restricting access to education is wrong.
Education is as much of an investment for a government as it is for the individual.

Also posted in humanity | 15 Responses

Unintended consequences

Two stories. 1) A former colleague of mine did a research project for a power company on one of those machines you have in your house that goes red if you are consuming lots of electricity. One participant started boiling water on the gas hob when she was making tea because that way she could […]

Also posted in design | Tagged appropriation, eco-gadgets, people | 7 Responses

Design by enthusiasm

As many of you are most probably aware I work for Canonical and some of my blog posts from here are syndicated to design.canonical.com. I was asked a rather interesting question on that blog and partly due to the impatience of the asker decided to respond by way of a post. My other motivation for […]

Also posted in design | Tagged , opensource | 6 Responses

Guadec Day 2: In pursuit of critical mass

Today I was reminded of this quote by Jane Goodall: If everyone could think a little bit about small choices they make every day: What do you eat, does it result in animal cruelty? What do you wear, how was it made, does it damage the environment? When people start thinking like that they do […]

Also posted in design | Tagged , opendesign, opensource | 6 Responses

Could you lend me some withdrawal please?

I find it enormously irritating when cash machines offer me a ‘withdrawal’. When I walk up to the cash point I am thinking about getting some cash. Some money. Moolah. Readies. Wonga. I have never uttered the line “I am just going to the cash machine to get a withdrawal” and I doubt that I […]

Posted in observations | 4 Responses

Blogging

At some point or another those who blog and those who read blogs end up having some sort of dialogue (internal or external) about blogging. The Voice’s workplace has recently launched a blog. (Though, as it allows no comment, I would argue that it is more of an archive of articles.) And, as a clever […]

Posted in observations | Tagged participation, privacy | 6 Responses

Paranoid population

Has anyone heard those new ads on the radio? “How can you tell the difference between someone just hanging about and a terrorist casing a place?” (Ok, so I am paraphrasing a little here but that is the gist of it!) I don’t like it. Is creating a paranoid population really the best use of […]

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Is internet access a utility?

I have been staying with The Voice for the last few weeks. His broadband connection hasn’t been working for the last 2 weeks. The inadequacies of Tiscali and Sky Broadband notwithstanding – between them they seem to think that a 4 week interruption to service is acceptable – is it only me who sees internet […]

Posted in observations | 3 Responses