sensemaya

Latest — 07 Jan 2025

Falsehood engineers believe about calendars

The future can exist only in terms of events. Future and past choices about working hours locations availability et cetera do not exist. Working hours cannot end at midnight. Working hours never extend into the next day. A calendar should only contain events specified in absolute time and not relative

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The Great Wounding

What should we call this moment? For in naming it we give birth to its children.

Workarounds are sources of new features

Observing workarounds is a very efficient way of identifying new features

The challenges of democracy are like the challenges of doing user-centered design

Here follow some propositions making parallels between the two and why there is a case for governance and politics to draw from the toolkits of user/human centered design. And, to a smaller degree, vice versa.

Stupid Machines: a UX design technique

Consider the following stupid machines: 1. machine that runs into corners at high speed and yelps upon impact 2. goes up against a person’s leg, looks up at them, and smirks 3. same as above, but sprays water at a leg 4. accelerates towards raised edges and falls off

Wise metrics

Propositions on sensibly making use of metrics when designing things: (for mathematically minded people) Axioms: 1. Those metrics matter, which matter to the people the metrics are supposedly helping serve 2. Those metrics matter, which represent the fitness of a "solution" to its context 3. Those metrics which

Asking good questions: the difference between Trend-hunting & Foresight

A friend forwarded me these 10 questions from an ad agency that runs a 'global scout network', soliciting opinions on '10 key elements of Culture' (to be answered, btw, in 10 minutes). Looking at them, it strikes me that the difference between how advertising and foresight

Ancient bugs in PowerPoint

As a researcher, I create a lot of PowerPoint documents - apart from its ubiquity in the professional knowledge worker world, it has decent visual editing tools and its one-page-at-a-time format helps structure narratives and data. But there have been some frustrating usability bugs in PowerPoint that I've

6 degrees of inclusivity

Just realized if that the 6 degrees of separation hypothesis is true, someone like me is only 6 links away from my polar opposite person (e.g. a militaristic rural religious fundamentalist). This suggests an important measure of social health: how many network links from any given person to someone

A new flag for San Francisco

I was binge-listening to that most fabulous of design podcasts, 99% invisible, and came across this analysis of San Francisco's flag and how terrible it is. I looked around, and found only one attempt at redesign, which I found unsatisfactory. So here is an attempt to come up