This week I have learned:
- the power of using fiction as a tool. This sprang out of a conversation with a new connection at the beginning of the week. I like the idea of creating prosaic artefacts of the future to think about how the world might be different and better.
- a personal form of time travel. The wonderful Mark Earls has been writing about time travel. It dawned on me this week (after meeting a former BBC colleague with whom there’s been next to no contact for 20 years) that re-establishing relationships like that is weirdly like time travel. You go back to the point at which you dropped contact and although you have both lived lives, somehow you are also back then as well as in the here and now.
- Time travel gives me a vague sense of vertigo.
- are the people who have the skills to define user needs also the people who can define those needs when the users are technologists? I sometimes see design people put up boundaries when things look technical. But if the needs that need to be defined and supported are themselves technical, they still need designing.
- talk about remote, hybrid and in-person is going to trigger lots of people in lots of different ways for a long time to come. I include myself in that statement.
- Another pitch coming up next week. Trying to make it human, not mechanical.
- Local elections are like a low-alcohol beer of elections. They taste similar but miss the impact.
- Cardstock is my second favourite community that I’ve had a hand in setting up. WB-40 is the first.
- Teenagers, eh?
- Seeing some of my words turn up in print was a lovely thing to behold.
- Chiswick House and gardens are fascinating.
Next week: short week, big pitch.
The week in photos:
mmitII 