Understanding Media Today (2024)
A talk celebrating sixty years of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work “Understanding Media”, which changed how we think about the nature communication. His aphorisms and probes — the most famous being “the medium is the message” and “the global village” — have sunk into the collective unconscious, yet for many today he is a distant figure, even in the field of media ecology.
For a time McLuhan was spoken of alongside Newton, Einstein and Freud. A man of paradox, he was a conservative Catholic who became a counterculture icon; a historian exalted as a futurist. By the late 1970s, however, McLuhan was a forgotten figure, dismissed as unserious, a borderline crank. Yet the decades since his death have proven that his key insight and instincts were far more profound that perhaps even he realised.
This two-hour talk with Long Now London I took the audience on a journey through the origins, development and implications of McLuhan’s worldview, and talked about how his ideas and outlook are as fresh today as they were six decades ago.
Becoming a UX Centaur (2023)
In July 2023 I spoke at UX Crunch alongside Mujtaba Hameed and Olena Bulygina about the intersection of UX and AI. A common theme between us was that generating "users" is folly, but that new generations of AI tools may lead to novel ways of synthesising information, speeding up workflows, and extending and augmenting our current capabilities as researchers and designers. For instance, I've found Midjourney an extraordinary tool to help tell the stories of users and make research findings more accessible. I’ve always considered the value of good UX is to provide a pipeline of real human voices to the often inhuman world of dashboards and numbers that is the boardroom. One danger is that sometimes costly qualitative research comes to be seen as something that can be replaced by authentic-sounding- but phantasmic portrayals of customers and user needs conjured by AI, whose validity is justified through the motivated reasoning of needing to tighten the budget.
The Deep Time of Technē (2022)
In May 2022, at Salon Noire in Black’s Club, I gave my first public attempt* at articulating my thoughts on the relationship between art, technology, and the human condition and how it impacts the modern world and our day-to-day lives. Covering the shifting nature of media in its major phases, beginning in the stone age, it told the story of how humans tell stories, how we derive meaning, and how things went so terribly wrong. You can watch a brief quote clip made for the event - Apollo & Dionysus - here, voiced by Kirsten Gord.
*Outside of boring my colleagues at the bar
The XD Hackathon (2022)
In early 2022, I wrote, designed and organised four hourly training sessions for Inviqa’s XD team about the origins and function of storytelling, models on how to structure them, how to write scripts, and how to record, film and edit video. The series culminated in the XD Hackathon, hosted by myself. Following it, as hoped, our team started to produce more video content more often, in a variety of interesting contexts. We are living through the twilight of mass literacy, and burdening clients with weighty research reports is no way to impact a business.
Why Deep Work (2021)
Delivered remotely for the 2021 BAD (Behaviour and Design) conference in 2021, this presentation was advocacy for the value of Deep Work and how to create optimal conditions for people, and teams, achieving '“Flow States”. Flow states are essential to both human flourishing and to productivity, but are often at odds with how technology projects are scoped and sold. You can see the full deck here.
WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS (2015)
This talk, first given at Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University London, was a humorous look at the neurological and cultural basis of the at the fault line between the different worldview and cognitive styles of developers and designers.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: THE FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS (2015)
This talk - initially created for a "lunch and learn" - looks at the use of technology to communicate information throughout humanity's history, and how it has altered the course of our evolution.
UK DIGITal STRATEGY Consultation (2016)
I contributed to a 2016 Digital Consultation document to share ideas about the UK’s future digital strategy, along with other members of Newspeak House. This was authored in response to UK Government Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey’s call for public and industry to share their ideas on how to fuel the UK’s digital revolution. My contribution in large part focussed on digital literacy including the need for critical thinking and ways to assess if something is “true” be taught alongside other fundamental skills.
Read more the full document or the section on digital literacy.
Floodhack (2014)
In 2014 I attended #Floodhack; a response by the tech community to develop new technologies to help respond to flash flooding in order to minimise damage and save lives. Our concept - working title MyState - was a low-tech (feature phone and up) means for emergency services to gain an information-rich map of affected areas and receive warnings for their location should conditions escalate. The system was judged by Google, Tech City, No. 10, and the Cabinet Office, and our concept was incorporated into the UK’s future flood response strategy. Learn more about Floodhack here.
Hack The Workplace (2014)
Have the Workplace was a two-day workshop to develop ways of improving the workplace through new practices and technologies. We developed an online service to create "weak ties" between different parts of companies to facilitate the spread of ideas, nurture friendships and limit the spread of cliques and patrimonialism that can damage corporate culture . At the end of the weekend, to some embarrassment, I was presented an award for the “hardest worker”.
Startup Weekend (2012)
On the weekend on March 2nd 2012 I took part in Startup Weekend, hosted at Google’s Head Office in Dublin. While my own project pitch, for Deep Time, failed to get the adequate amount of backing, I joined the AppAce Team to help Stephen McManus achieve his vision of creating a classrooom based game for teaching students entrepreneurial skills. Along with Hrishikesh Ballal, I developed the gameplay mechanics, graphics and the above video, which I presented at the end of the weekend. AppAce has now evolved into the startup RipTide Academy. You can view our presentation reel here.