Category: Personal
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The User Experience Flip Mode
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One basic assumption of good experience design is that people fundamentally don’t like change. They can’t deal with it, it’s too risky, and changes will all too often lead to failures. But the human mind’s capacity to adapt to change, sometimes rapidly and seamlessly, can be astonishing.
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What I Learned in Art School (Is it Design Thinking?)
Like a fish who doesn’t know that he is wet, I have no idea what it is like to not be a design thinker. And I suppose that, conversely, a lot of people who talk about design thinking have no idea what designers are actually taught. Are we really taught different skills than our MBA…
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Innovation Through Ignorance
When I write a blog post about something I’m not an expert on, which is pretty much everything I write about, I usually Google the hell out of it first to (a) make sure I don’t say something stupid, (b) get some ideas I can build on to make myself seem smarter, and (c) avoid…
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Think of Al Gore. Don’t be a Dick.
Al Gore and Iron Eyes Cody. Go check out the original TV ads: Canoe and Horseback Whenever I am about to do something wasteful, like throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or turning the air conditioner on when it’s 74 degrees, my wife says these words to me: “Think of Al Gore.” The phrase,…
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Inside the Airstream
Peggy and I went upstate last weekend for our friend M.River’s birthday party. We gathered at Kate’s Lazy Meadow Motel in lovely Mt. Tremper, New York, owned and operated by Kate Pierson from the B-52’s. We stayed in one of her four (soon to be six) fully-functional vintage Airstream trailers.
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Our Swimmer
This is the least humiliating frame from my whole clip. I’ve recently started a swimming training program so I can competently complete my weakest part of the trifecta: Running, biking, and swimming. Hopefully by next summer I will be ready for my goal, to compete in the New York City Triathlon. An interesting aspect of…
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I Feel the Need… The Need for One Speed!
This weekend I built my first single-speed bicycle. It’s not a fixed-gear or track bike — it has a single gear in the back with a freewheel mechanism, and as you can see it has brakes, too. For years I’ve wanted a single-speed bike just to see what all the fuss is about, but also…