Doctor's Note

A mix of essays and commentary about design, innovation, technology, society, coaching, personal and leadership development. Since 1996.

The Apple Watch, skeuomorphism and metaphors

I had a Twitter exchange with John Gruber yesterday in response to his point about the Apple Watch and skeuomorphism: I don’t think iOS or OS X needed to eschew …

Stop researching and start doing

Austin Kleon with some sage advice for anyone considering writing a book. It’s all good, but this is especially true: Stop researching, start writing. …

Safety in games, from Shakespeare to Plato to Play Theory

Interesting piece from Jesper Juul on play with this note about Brian Sutton-Smith: On two occasions I heard Brian Sutton-Smith claim that play provides a …

Antirom 20th Anniversary Event

REWIND to 1995 - A collective of young Londoners launches Antirom, a CD-ROM of experimental interactive software, at Cameraworks gallery in Bethnal Green. The …

Comcast Customer Receives Bill Addressed to ‘Super Bitch‘

In our book on service design and elsewhere, we often talk about how much people are at the heart of services. Although branding folk like to speak of products …

Fixing photo and video file metadata with ExifTool

This post is really a note-to-self for when I next have to remember how to deal with missing photo and QuickTime movie metadata. Nevertheless, since it took me …

Getting from here to there – from hunch to research direction to design concept

Getting from here to there – from hunch to research direction to design concept

The most common issue my students face is project paralysis in the face of infinite possibilities and the synthesis of a mass of research material. Services are …