Less than you want, more than you deserve
Four years ago I started in on a 2 year full time UX design/research vocational degree, and at the same time I started Hintlab as a collaborative platform to do some more experimental stuff. The need to solve usability problems with an analytic and strategic mindset seemed to be a perfect combination of my inclinations [ ]
It s worth remembering that most people in the world today don t live in liberal democracies, and there s nothing inherently natural about a progression towards democracy or anything like that. All forms of human government is the result of people with different values and priorities competing for power. And it s easier to be autocratic these days [ ]
The BanRay.eu project has been up for a few weeks. (1) I made it to accompany a sticker design that you put up if you want to limit network wearables (such as Metas Rayban) on your premises. The ultimate goal is to raise awareness and combat the insatiable hunger for our data that FAANG+ has. [ ]
After an unscheduled hiatus I ve activated the monocultured.com portfolio again – and this time I have something which is scalable and easy to maintain! It has categories! It also has a self-hosted shop! The goal is to add most of the stuff I ve produced over the years – photo, audio, writing – and have it as a [ ]
I ve done a thing: BanRay.eu – it s about nipping a bad idea in the bud. You should check it out. In these technofeudal times, it s easy to strike out at the most blatant examples of bad products and services, and missing the more insidious stuff. But targeting the blatant has its benefits, and there are few [ ]
Talking to a friend about our AI use, I came to a realisation about what role Claude has assumed in my life: It s an idle clicker game for me to feel productive. If you don t know what an idle clicker game is, Wikipedia does a good job of summerizing the genre: An incremental game is [ ]
Back in 2001 I made a Relationship Evaluation Form™ as PDF you could print and fill out for your ex. Now I ve recreated it with 100% more web-interactivity! The Relationship Evaluation Form started as an in-joke with friends in Iceland, following a breakup and all the discussions that entails. We were commiserating about love s unknowns [ ]
I m starting this post in Ermoupoli, Syros, where Petter and Alexandra kindly has lent us their house. So while people back home are battling rain and freezing weather ( -6°C feels like -12°C according to the weather app) we re dipping our toes in the mediterranian sea, drinking wine and eating olives. And of course reading books [ ]
Today is my first day renting a desk in a co-working space. I m sitting among other entreprenourial hopefuls and figured that my first point of action should be to catch up on my browser tabs and write a blog post. Y know, really start with a clean slate like. The company is named Matepo Research AB [ ]
So, I started a company again: Matepo Research AB. My services on offer right now are a mix between what I ve done with Hintlab — i.e. foresight and design fiction workshops — and what I learned during my two years at ITHS, i.e. UX and accessibility. As per the name, I m more into the research bit than [ ]
The first time I used the Plano F0 sketch pad was when I was studying in Karlstad, if I recall correctly. That was back in 1999, and even though I occasionally switched out of necessity, I always got back to it if I had the option. Together with the Shachihata 204 FAXBLAC 0.4 pen it [ ]
The other day I had a chat with an AI – as one does these days – asking for suggestions on how to build a robotic platform to exterminate the slugs that are infesting our garden. It suggested electro-shocking as means of murder and either a stationary platform with an arm, or a mobile hexapod roamer. As [ ]
Me and my brother travelled to Japan in May 2025, primarily to visit the Expo2025 exhibition in Osaka, but we also made a detour to Tokyo. As usual I shot a bunch of video, and above is a chronological cut. As is so often the case with my videos, it s mostly observational and rather detached [ ]
I recently got back after short of two weeks in Japan, where me and my brother first went to Osaka for the Expo 2025, and then Tokyo. I ended up buying a whole bunch of stuff, and most of it I bought just cause it was so darn pretty! The colours, mascots and logos all [ ]
Half of Sweden has been coughing since last fall – whatever virus the aliens have release is really doing a number on us. Dry coughing is the new normal, but last week I came down with something more serious, and this past weekend has seen me violently coughing up enough lung tissue to feed a small [ ]
Crossposted at Linkedin, which is my most active community outside of NFL and Reddit. The increasing polarization of both international relationships as well as intra-national politics has a radicalising effect. As expected, much of it is generated by the perfect storm of power politics and the dismantling of multilateralism that the current US administration is [ ]
One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Steven Levitsky Lucan Way: The Path to American Authoritarianism If you only read one summery of the dangers of the Trump presidency, the above is a [ ]
Someone over att Near Future Laboratory mentioned the Bicameral Mind and off I went down the rabbit hole. Thus, consciousness, like bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world. Wikipedia: Bicameral mentality The idea of the Bicameral mind is that humans quite recently didn t have a conscious introspective drive [ ]
I m slowly emerging from New Years hibernation and a trip to Greece. I ve shaved three weeks of itchy beard and am awaiting the caffeine pills to kick in so that I can get started on cleaning the apartment. It s a new year but the dust is old, so that will have to go. Philip Seamor [ ]
Same procedure as last year: I m listing my reading and abandoned reading in chronological order. I start this post January 1st, sitting in my comfy chair with a terrible cold, and it s set to automatically go public in a years time. But the identification of accountability with metrics and with transparency is deceptive. Accountability ought [ ]
As I m moving into the design and research field at the same time as it s being reshaped by both a recession and GenAI, I ve been thinking hard about what skills I m bringing with me into my adopted field – as well as what skills might differentiate me from my colleagues. One of those skills is a [ ]
Fire is a kind of magic to a child, and some of us never grow out of a fascination with it. The heat, the change of almost anything into ash, the smell and the smoke, the different noises of things burning. I’ve recently taken up smoking cigars – a habit I never thought I’d ever try, [ ]
After ten years as a project manager at KKV GBG, I m officially unemployed! I ve been a member at the collective workshop KKV GBG since my last year of art-school – 2007 – and since 2014 I was employed as project manager coordinator. KKV is a non-profit workshop with studios for professional artists and designers, and in [ ]
I never thought I d be sentimental about the auteuric vision of creativity, but here we are. Behold my latest creation: A hat with Content Not Even Once embroidered. It s a pastiche on the Montana anti-Meth slogan ( Meth Not Even Once ) suggesting, with only slight hyperbole, that engaging in content creation is as ruinous as meth. [ ]
Forced to adapt their sleeping patterns to meet the needs of firms on the other side of the planet and in different time zones, the largely Syrian population of Lebanon’s Shatila camp forgo their dreams to serve those of distant capitalists. Their nights are spent labeling footage of urban areas — house,” “shop,” “car” — [ ]
I m trying to dip my toes, get a foot in, dunk my head and generally jump bodily into the sea of UX careers, and beyond the obvious stuff – practice the craft, do good work, go to meetups – I m trying out a gimmick to get some conversations going: A limited run printed portfolio! I love [ ]
I re-read my Laborator post the other day and one paragraph tied into something else I ve been reading lately: Any communal project is a marathon rather than a sprint: It’s important to be able to step back and trust your collaborators to follow the plans you’ve agreed upon, but when stuff falls through you need [ ]
My previous phone was getting long in the tooth, and there was no way to get call recording to work on it, so I bit the bullet the second I saw that Nothing 2A was supported call recording out of the box. It s bigger than I d like, but I just have to live with the [ ]
I sleep with a notebook next to my bed, and sometimes I wake up with an idea, more often a turn of phrase or a slogan, and write it down. This particular morning I wrote I woke up rested, full of worthless energy . The type of energy I was thinking of was the kind that [ ]
Oik oik fellow piglets! I m starting this post January 9th in the year of our lord 2023. I have a slight cold, my calfs are aching after ill-advised amount of exercise yesterday, and I m looking forwards to the school semester starting again. Just like previous years, I m scheduling this post to go live 1st Jan [ ]
“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.” Rest of world, Victoria Turk: How AI reduces the [ ]
A while back I calculated my computational power according to screen estate, offering the suggestion that the more I can see (up to a point) at the same time, the more function I can extract from my computers information systems. Before that I d done a similar thing going through how many gigabytes of storage I [ ]
My first internship at RISE is coming to an end, and with that I m going back to school for two more courses this year – before heading out for a 16 week intership somewhere (Suggestions? Hit me up!). In additon to doing full time at ITHS, I ve been doing a bunch of courses at IxDF, and [ ]
In the fall of 2022 I began studying UX Design at IT-högskolan. The field was new to me and I did my best to navigate the concepts, methods and nomenclatures. I wished I could talk to people who were just a bit further along than I – ask them what I should focus on, what [ ]
When I started studying UX Design in the long ago time-before-time (fall of 2022) I promised myself that I d abandon all other projects and cut back on distracting reading – giving myself time and energy to focus on the studies. This worked well for a week or so. Turns out there are whole books written on [ ]
The title phrase and sentiment is taken from plagiarist internet commentator Ryan Brodericks newsletter Garbage Day, but it might as well be one of the conclusions of an Adam Curtis documentary. My childhood friend Matilda visited us in Gothenburg over the weekend, chaperoning her son who had a ticket to the three-day festival Way [ ]
I m back from a short vacation to Side (Turkey) which I spent reading and drinking beer. Also, looking at ruins. Side is an odd place where a contemporary charter tourist village has sprung up literally built on top of 2000 year old ruins. As a result, you see ancient brickabrack all over the place – they [ ]
My thoughts feel dated even before typing them up, but it s spring of 2023 and the world has its panties in a bunch over ChatGPT and other Natural Language Processing AI:s, and I just want to put my scratch in the goal post for future reference. There are new AI products being churned out faster [ ]
Since I m fascinated by rituals, secular and otherwise, I might have taken the whole short nails as a way to salvation thing a bit too far. Regardless, I m making a tract for people to hand out! My goal is to have the tracts distributed by people in the street in at least five locations across [ ]
We just finished watching the first season of His dark materials – a great show based on a great adventure book – and I was struck of how the look reminded me of the moods created by some of the Midjourney prompts. And this feels new. The newness isn t that an AI generated something in the style [ ]
There s a hypothesis of the Cortical homunculus – that our brains map motor control and sensory input in different proportion to their size. In practice it means that your hands, one of our primary exploratory tools, have an outsized mental space in your brain. Along with parts of your face, genitals and feet, they are considered [ ]
Once again, I m at the beginning of a new year, writing a post which isn t scheduled to publish till a year hence. Physically, I m starting this year in my winged chair, in Majorna. I haven t made any drastic new years promises more than the usual ones of dressing a bit better and getting more fit, [ ]
Earlier today, I took my lovely girlfriend for lunch, and at first we had raw oysters and then mussels chips. It was the first time in the 22 years that I ve considered myself vegan that I ve eaten something animal-based. Ok, that s not totally true. When I came down with Covid last year, I had [ ]
Sort-of borrowing the title from one of Randall Monroes books, it serves to remind us that there s still relatively little that we know about ourselves on a fundamental physical and psychological level. Observe: The transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration requires six weeks of once-daily sessions. Only about half [ ]
Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” […] What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also [ ]
The geeky version of crystal healing might be the nootropic stack – mixes of different pills and powders you take to effect cognition memory. I m enthusiastic about it since at least in theory there ought to be a bunch of chemicals which can pass the blood-brain barrier and make us more interesting. One established family [ ]
When I learned about DALL•E last year it seemed like magic – basically casting spells at a computer and getting images out – and now there s Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (the latter which I can now run on my M1 laptop) and overnight there s a whole ecology of secondary AI tools that have popped up. Since [ ]
Lifting your eyes from your daily problems, you might see the edifices of human power stuctures outlined among the clouds, so all-encompassing that you don t reflect on them most of the time. Networks of power, resources, influence and all around, oh my. And cheese: People receiving meals from prisons, schools, and charities have little control [ ]
In a weeks time I m starting a two year full-time course to become a UX designer, at iths. I ve been doing the coordinator and project management stuff at KKV GBG for eight years by now, and it s time to learn something new. I m also trying to reinvent myself – It s been fifteen years since I graduated [ ]
I m typing this in the stillness between the stabs of acute lumbago. Most likely it s a delayed bill for overdoing it at the gym a week ago, and in combination with a cold the past week has been so-so; I m fearful of sneezing because it throws my back out and is really painful. Summer is [ ]