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In this draft column for interactions magazine, I ponder food, flavour and taste, and consider fact and fiction, research and ritual around food. More »

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 »

This was the draft for an interactions magazine article that came out in May 2012 (interactions , Volume 19 Issue 3). In this article I consider different ways in which institutions measure impact. Looking at what institutions consider to be meaningful measures of impact is one way to think about how institutions “think” as social observer Mary Douglas might put it. Explicitly reflecting on these metrics, from whence they derive, who endorses them (or not), is also a good way to think about how once can become part of the conversation and perhaps even work on persuading those same institutions to reflect and adopt more meaningful metrics. More »

In this draft document, I discuss the way in which human emotion has been theorised and is being measured/monitored through emerging technologies. I offer a brief critique of simplistic approaches that conflate arousal and emotion, and discuss some implications for designers of interactive technologies. This is a draft of a column I wrote for the ACM’s interactions magazine. It appeared in late 2011. More »