Category: design
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Principles for work
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A short blog post, to remember a thing I wrote at the weekend, and expand on it a little. I am becoming conscious of a reputation I have when it comes to opinions on Large Language Models, and that feels quite a small topic to be bothered by. I think instead that it is just…
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Shearing Layers & Pace Layers
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There is a great story about Hunter S. Thompson typing out all of The Great Gatsby and Farewell to Arms in order of what it felt like to write a masterpiece. It might be a myth. But there is something that speaks to us in the idea, which is why it persists. I am reminded…
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Design as a Demonstrator
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Over in West London, there is a building whose purpose is to start things, even though it will never be finished. It is The Stone Demonstrator, an installation by the Design Museum and Future Observatory team which is to act as a prototype that starts conversations in the building industry about the what, where and…
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Paired prompting
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I was talking to Tracey Camilleri yesterday about workplace design in the the age of LLMs, and then Chris Noessel about his forthcoming book, Cognitive Debt (and the potential for Cognitive Surplus), and I have a head full of ideas and desk full of new cards. Of those, this one felt worth trying to quickly…
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Futures Through Design – 2026
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I am delighted to announce that Futures Through Design, the three-day course I designed and led with with Rob Phillips and Gem Barton at the Royal College of Art in London this summer, is returning in late February 2026. There are lots of reasons I’m really pleased we’re able to run it again, but right…
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More buildings about people and songs
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I went to a brilliant event last night at Arup in London. After a talk from Michael Pawlyn for the launch of the third edition of his book Biomimicry in Architecture, he joined a panel (Charlie Warwick, Jo da Silva, Andy Chalmers & Tom Lloyd) to discuss how to push beyond a ‘sustainable’ building industry…
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Creating place-based regenerative explorations
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I received a really interesting email from Radko Kovachev at the Institute for Circular Economy in Bulgaria, asking about how to apply the Regenerative Design Field Kit which they had bought to a fascinating project they are working on. Rather than just email back, we agreed to put this up as blog post, so others…
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Design Innovation: Venture Creation
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I am running a one-off elective, called Design Innovation: Venture Creation as part of the Design Futures programme at The Royal College of Art over the next nine weeks. I wanted to set out a particular angle on this elective, to push further into the sort of ventures we need more of in future. This…
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Making green spaces visible for communities
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Today I quickly put together a timelapse video using Google Earth Pro, a free-to-download piece of software from Google. This was for our local nature group, to visualise not just the housing development that has happened around here, but also to what has actually happened to some of the farmland that has been rewilding over…
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Exploring the Evolution of Cards
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I spoke about cards at Papercamp 3 a little over a week ago. And I saw Tom Abba for the first time in person, since, perhaps, he and Duncan talked at the first card-based meetup I hosted in 2013. Which was nice. Then I repeated the talk at Friday’s monthly Cardstock online meetup. As usual,…
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Ecological Citizens and Regenerative Design
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HCI Talk with Dr Rob Phillips (RCA) The first people we used the Regenerative Design Field Kit with were the students of the RCA Design Futures programme. As part of this, Dr Rob Phillips suggested we also put a paper together, looping in the Ecological Citizens project, to submit to the Human-Computer Interaction conference, discussing…
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Reflections on Innovation & Future Thinking
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Toban Shadlyn and John V Willshire Introduction We are approaching the tenth anniversary year of the Innovation and Future Thinking course at IED Barcelona. In the summer of 2024, it will run from Monday 9th July for two weeks. Usually, around this time, we write an explanation of what the theme will be for the…