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These are actual drafts for whatever I am working on
Reasons to be Cheerful
This is a draft of a column I wrote for ACM interactions magazine. I have been thinking a lot recently about physical and emotional health, and especially about the tricks we play on ourselves to uplift mood and perspective in challenging times. I have an “earworm” for challenging times, a 1970’s single that was released in the UK by Ian Dury and The Blockheads. This column is named after that song, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3. More »
Putting the Person Back Into Personalization
In this draft of a column I wrote for ACM’s interactions magazine, I propose that we need to rethink and expand our ideas about “personalization”. Building on my discussion of data and data sciences, I believe we need to think about process “process” personalization, where we design for interactive exchanges more carefully as well as “outcome” personalization which is what we are currently focused on in the search, recommendation and collaborative filtering world. As interfaces and interactions get more adaptive, the “intelligence” embodied in the data we gather needs to be put to the design of adaptable and socially adept user interfaces as well as carefully filtered content. We need to think about the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. More »
A matter of taste
In this draft column for interactions magazine, I ponder food, flavour and taste, and consider fact and fiction, research and ritual around food. More »
Data Aware Design
In this draft of a column I wrote for ACM’s interactions magazine, I propose that we need to treat data as a design problem. We need to not just build better interfaces for exploring data or doing data analysis, we need to think about data capture (system instrumentation), data representation, data integration and data management as part of a bigger data design space. This means thinking about different stakeholders and their needs more systematically. Behind “Big Data” are a lot of little data choices. More »
