A machine for walking
I have rented a machine to do my walking for me. I can walk, of course, and choose to do so often. Sometimes I walk because my work demands it; that I should go to a particular place at a specified...
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Design as a Demonstrator
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...
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Random Roadtrip Radio
We’ve been away for Easter in the campervan. I think we’ve seen all of the possible weathers of the United Kingdom through the ten days we were away. We have a fun music game for trips like this....
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Pokémon Gone
I posted some writing yesterday about Pokémon Go, a fun throwaway remark in a book chapter I’m writing for Riccardo Torta & Beatrice Villari. Little did I know that the news was emerging that...
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Seeing like a Stoat
I’ve been seeing, hearing, and… sensing… a lot of things of late pointing in a similar direction, so worth a quick post and a useful pun. I started with a shat with Matt Pritchard, who amongst other...
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More time than reasonably expected
This week, I gave a talk at the first (and there will be more) Wilding Gardens conference in Manchester. My slides and a few notes are here. And it might have been recorded, so I will share that...
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Sussex is a Thing
I was invited this week to give a short talk on day one of the Sussex & Brighton Devolution Policy Sprint, which was being held to start exploring requirements for the formation of a Mayoral...
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Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt
I have been thinking a lot recently about Cognitive Debt from one particular perspective; often the need for ‘thinking’ is not being replaced, but instead just reshaped and pushed elsewhere in a...
View ArticleWhat *is* writing?
If you aren’t going to really write something, I’m not really going to read it. This was a reaction I captured on a card a couple of weeks ago. I can’t even remember what spurred it; an extra long...
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Letter from a Steward
I met Hardeep Kaur (or H) through a The STEPS Collective event in London that Chris Daniel shared to the Long Now London community he is a steward of. In subsequent conversations, H started talking...
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Paired prompting
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),...
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Shearing layers and square metres
Workplace Design shouldn’t be a paint by numbers job. But there’s one number that interests me in particular. A recent post by Bruce Daisley caught my eye. He has been looking at some recent research...
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Futures Through Design – 2026
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...
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More buildings about people and songs
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...
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Zuck has a performance problem
Mark Zuckerberg has trouble performing. And I’m not just talking about his ongoing, stilted stage appearances at announcement events (Steve Jobs, he is not). It’s his AI Performance. At the 2025 Meta...
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Deep Time Walk with The STEPS Collective
Last Friday (12th Sept), Pins Brown and Sam Jarman led a Deep Time Walk for The STEPS Collective around Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs near Brighton. A Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walk through 4.6bn...
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Organisational Surface Area
Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange...
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Creating place-based regenerative explorations
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...
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Cognitive Debt
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts Newsletter 247 The idea of Cognitive Debt seems...
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A new home for an old desk
Ten years ago, I came across this story online – somebody had rescued six large reading desks from the demolition of Birmingham Central Library. And that person lived locally to me down in Sussex. I...
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