Making things for the web is still fun. No, I don't need a better definition of fun. And still hard to get right.

I work as a researcher and designer of services and experiences.

It’s a difficult job to explain to family and friends, but I've been doing it a while so I should be able to manage by now. Here's a wee bit about work I've done.

Currently, I’m working at a consultancy called Valtech, and live in Somerset. You can read a bit more about where I’m at right now

But a weblog wouldn’t be a weblog without a sporadically-updated feed of thoughts, links and information on speaking engagements (spoiler alert: not many of these).

Thanks for stopping by.

Snippets of interest

A never-ending stream of distraction devices

Using thematic analysis in psychology - Sam Ladner tells us this is the second-most cited paper of the 21st Century. That's... kind of heartening.
Apr 2025
Good artists borrow, big business steals - Companies... don’t sell historic materials themselves, just interfaces for finding them.
Apr 2025
A city is not a computer - Been rummaging through Obsidian. This is a classic from 2017.
Apr 2025
Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions - join me in getting antsy about the advent of vibe designing
Mar 2025
Hardle - Still on the Dles like its 2020
Feb 2025
The case against travel - I disagree with chunks of this, but I like the pushback against travel as achievement
Mar 2025
Measuring users’ mental models - Lawton Pybus is a smart one
Feb 2024
Is your remote job making you lonely? - It's a rare L for Betteridge's law. Yes, HBR, yes it is.
May 2023
Meetings *are* the work - What matters in our remote, knowledge economy? When we're together. Hmmm.
Feb 2023
Positivism research philosophy - I like this explainer. It's the sort of thing chatGPT eats for breakfast these days
Mar 2023
Pharoah Sanders' Izipho Zam - This is a fantastic album, as long as you like free jazz...
Oct 2022
NASA TLX - Spot of learning about NASA's Task Load Analysis
Oct 2022
Designing remote ethnography - Stripe Partners, curious and helpful as ever
Oct 2022
Resource of collaborative learning practices - Trove of usefulness from Cornell University
Oct 2022
Window Swap - Rediscovered this after a conversation about maps and travel
Sep 2022
Will the millennial aesthetic ever end? -
Sep 2022
The Vangelis – ‘Rhythm & Sound – A Burial Mix’ (2005) - god love Basic Channel
Sep 2022
How to make sense of your design research - Good article on research synthesis
Jul 2022
Giant Steps as an animation - Great video of synaethesia
Aug 2022
Joel Sternfeld - Photography hero
Jul 2022
Dollar Street - Gapminder's Dollar Street is crazy, a fantastic anthropological resource
Jul 2022
Aave - Trying to make sense of crypto - not getting very far. I don't know what a liquidity protocol is. And what are dapps?
Jul 2022