Talking about designing interactions, systems, ways of thinking, and better ways to communicate with other humans and our tools alike.
The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described how science is more than experiments and the natural laws derived from them, it is also a community, a culture of language and practices that build knowledge and understanding. Those community norms create the ability to hypothesize, explain, and understand the world. Data science is a science in that it needs the same language and shared paradigm,…
Alberto Romero wrote a wonderful post about what it feels like to be a support of the AI industry (whatever that might mean) today: I want to express my frustrations with the industry as someone who would love to see it doing well. What he identifies is not issues with the technology itself. He doesn't have a problem with neural networks or with large language models or with gradient descent. He…
What thinking about economics does for designers Designers and product people don’t think about economics all that often. Sure, a product manager thinks about ARR or CAC, a design lead looks at their project budget, someone talks about burn rates or material design costs, but none of those are really economics. That’s just accounting. Economics is, bear with me here, actually pretty interesting.…
Do you like predicting the future? Of course you do. You'll be a billionaire, you'll save the planet, you'll wait until just the right moment to buy that plane ticket, the list goes on. Of course, actually predicting the future is a bit more boring than that. Most of the time we want to predict things like when machine on a production line might start failing or when there might be a spike in…
A few months back I gave a talk to a group at Rosenfeld Media called the Quant-Qual Bridge who looks at ways of bridging quantitative and qualitative thinking in design research and broader design practice. It was a fantastically good time. The slides are here in PDF format: Causal Inference for Designers or as Google Slides
A lot of people are quite excited about the Humane AI Pin, some are not, quite a few more didn’t hear about it at all. If you haven’t heard about it, their website lives here . I find it a curiously beautiful little device, a stab at a new paradigm in computing which ostensibly frees us from screens and the neck pain of craning down to look at our phones. The glowing rectangle is replaced with a…
Why should we care about making communality possible? Not Big D Democracy (though that can certainly be supported by communality), not Commune Living or Communism, or really any kind of 'ism’, though all of those can be supported by communality. Just plain old little ‘c’ communities that exist, support, inform, and provide profoundly human interdependence and connection. I’m going to mostly skip…
A little while back I posted a little challenge on LinkedIn: Tell me about an individual, discrete, and actionable policy that would prevent harms by an AI. Please include the following What the policy would prevent with some level of specificity as to the who, how, and why Some actionable concept of what the test for this harm would be Who would apply the test Who would enforce penalties for…
Matching for Causes without Experiments Sometimes we have an experiment that we can run to figure out if something is working: give one person a pill and give another a placebo, one person gets a blue button and another gets a green one, one town gets a new health clinic and another doesn’t. Plenty of times though, that just isn’t possible or practical or ethical. Giving someone a blue or green…
I wrote a few articles last year that explored how we could look at how measuring what a redesign of a service caused. In a hypothetical customer service scenario, the hypothesis that a redesign might cause people to give the service a higher rating or to quit using it less was explored using Latent Class Analysis . One comment that my friend Francesca Desmarais made when reviewing that article…
In the last article that I posted here I dug into what an experimental design to test the ease of use of a service design might look like. If you haven’t read that article, you definitely should read that article before reading this one because I’m going to skip a lot of the set up and description of the project, the data, and the code. As with last time, the repository for the code and the data…
In Bill Arnings brilliantly titled essay “Sure, everyone might be an artist…but only one artist gets to be the guy who says that everyone else is an artist” Arning writes about a bake sale that artist Elaine Tin Nyo held at the New York City gallery Deitch Projects. An invited group of artists baked pies, cookies, and sweets; Tin Nyo and a few other curators and artists sold them to passers-by.…
What does your design cause which is undesirable or unintended or at odds with the design intent? How does one ask and answer these questions? In these next few posts I’m going to propose some ways of answering these questions that build up in complexity and propose some ways of thinking about causality and modeling effects that are relevant for thinking about ways to capture what’s most important…
I am oh so very close to the finish line of the Masters of Information in Data Science at UC Berkeley and in between battling CUDA ‘Out Of Memory’ errors and underperforming neural networks, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what brought me to this point. Throughout the program people have been asking me why I’m doing this degree and what I want to do afterwards. When I tell my professors and…
Before a work trip I was instructed to take an anti-malarial drug. We were going to Nigeria for work and the previous team that had gone there to do research had all come back malarial. Not a big deal for people who’ve developed a resistance to it but as folks from the US/EU, they were all incapacitated by it. As another person from the US/EU, I was a focal point of the “get an anti-malarial”…
This little essay is, like so many of the things that I post on Medium, a wooly ramble that doesn’t end with a pat conclusion. Apologies in advance. I love the term “life-hack”. It’s been around long enough now to have entered the lexicon in a meaningful way and it sounds so clever, so reassuringly nimble. The term was invented by the tech writer Danny O’Brien and revealed to the world in a talk…
A few days ago I (jokingly) said in a conversation: “Instagram was discovered in 2010” And when I thought about it for a moment I realized it actually didn’t sound as wrong as I meant it to. “Invented Instagram” sounds a little odd, it’s not as if the cameras, phones, cell networks, GPS network, color LCD screens, and every other component wasn’t already there waiting to be used. “Created” or…
I’ve been trying to understand the difference between art and design for years now. I’m not sure why it seemed important to me to parse these two things, but it did. It probably has something to do with going from art to design and having attended and taught at both art schools and design schools. But finally a few days ago during a sleepless night in a hostel in British Columbia, something…
My friend John Wieja passed away December 25, 2017 in Zhuhai China, a few weeks before he would have turned 42 years old. I don’t know if he had friends with him there with him in the hospital, I don’t know if he had any family near him, I don’t know a what his last few days were like. I found this out, as one so often does now, from Facebook by reading the disjointed posts from friends scattered…
Video These boards are for a workshop I ran at Resonate 2016 called “Volt, Amp, Synth & Sound” I really wanted to make a simple workshop about electronics that all beginners could understand. It was a fun little exercise in making an intuitive and approachable way to learn something that is usually thought of as difficult. I usually teach workshops on code and that means you have to spend a lot of…
Yesterday I was driving up I5 here and as I started to go from I5 Northbound to the Madison exits I saw a guy very nonchalantly pushing a shopping cart along the side of the off-ramp against traffic. I know that people sometimes stay under the overpasses around the intersection of 5 and 90 because it’s a) covered from the rain and b) it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will come in there bother…
People sometimes ask what I think about when I run for hours on end. I usually just shrug, smile, make a deflecting joke. The thing I love about long distance running is that it takes the manifold of problems that is life and brutally reduces it to a Cartesian two vector, time and distance. One possesses an array of tactics but a single strategy: let nothing else intrude. That which adds any…
I have read Ian Bogost and I’ve begun reading Graham Harman, and it’s becoming entirely clear to me why new media artists are so enamored with their ideas. First, Graham Harman is hard reading if you’re not comfortable with Husserl and Heidegger, but his core concepts, the necessity of considering objects and systems, is undeniably compelling. It makes perfect sense that the populist approach to…
Here is an image taken without the subjects explicit permission in public: Here is another: Here is a third: What is the difference between these images? Here’s one: the first and second were taken with something that is instantly recognizable as a camera: a 4×5 inch camera. The third was taken by a computer, which most people realize can contain cameras, but are not generally classified as…