Looking at the state of UX in open data, and tips for how to navigate the beast that is government open data. — Open data is a wonderful thing, especially at the governmental level. It increases transparency, which in turn decreases corruption. It increases knowledge sharing, which also increases innovation. At a macro level, open data creates a more efficient and innovative society. On the micro level, open data allows anyone, even high…

The discovery phase sets a solid foundation for a digital project. — A solid foundation helps organisations reduce problems down the track. The discovery phase is quite involved, but really it boils down to this: starting a digital project on a solid foundation so that precious time and money isn’t wasted setting the project in a bad direction. Definition: A discovery is…

Originally scheduled to be a talk at Geelong Design Week, but after the coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of the event, so in line with the subject of the talk, I delivered a webinar instead. This article is a summary. Remote work is skyrocketing in the recent coronavirus pandemic. The…

Join here on Friday, March 16 at 2pm, AEDT GMT+11: https://zoom.us/j/985679502 Add to your Google Calendar — Initially titled “Fast-forwarding innovation with Google’s Design Sprint process”, this my scheduled talk for Geelong Design Week 2020. Coronavirus spoiled the fun and the event was cancelled by organisers. Now, I’ve decided to run this talk as a free webinar. …

The design world paints a picture of “design as a science”. I argue that there are still many nonsensical beliefs. — “Good personas are indispensable.” No, not really. Personas are overrated. Even the good ones. And 99% of personas I’ve seen are done because “everyone else is doing it, and because this is, like, what designers do because business value or something…” I can hear an army of researchers yelling “you think that because you…

Take the exploration factor of Geocaching, the LOL factor of Reddit, and the community tagging aspect of Hoodmaps. Shake well to mix. Boom! You get G̶e̶̶̶o̶̶̶c̶̶̶a̶̶̶c̶̶̶h̶̶̶i̶̶̶n̶̶̶g̶̶̶r̶̶̶e̶̶̶d̶̶̶d̶̶̶i̶̶̶t̶h̶o̶o̶d̶m̶a̶p̶s̶ XRAY.

Imagine a sort of Epicurian comune that you could access no matter where in the world you are. Inspired by movements such as the Epicurian commune mentioned above, the Homebrew Computer Club, support groups and design thinking workshops, the idea for a online homebrew co-learning space came about. I…

This is a write up of a talk given at the 2019 CAA International archaeology conference in Krakow, Poland. See the slides. Over the last five years, we’ve been working on cross-platform web, mobile, and AR/VR apps for several excavations as term partners. Some of our original goals starting out…

When visiting a museum I’m often focused on the museum experience itself, rather than just what’s on offer. Here are my observations from a visit to a beacon of cultural heritage in the Middle East.