Andy Polaine
DeSForM 2010 - 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form and Movement
It seems it’s conference season. My colleague, Dagmar Steffen, is organising the DeSForM 2010, the 6th International Workshop on Design Semantics of Form …
Writing & Thinking
A mix of essays and commentary about design, innovation, technology, society, coaching, personal and leadership development. Since 1996.
Interaction 11 Student Competition
All you interaction design students out there get ready to show us your goods. This year I’m co-chairing the Interaction 11 Student Competition with Liz …
The Virtues of Imperfection
I have enjoyed all of Jonathan Franzen’s books, in particular The Corrections, his novel about the complexities of family relationships, careers and, for …
Crowd-sourced insights into the Victorian workhouse
The UK National Archives have just released the 19th Century Poor Law Union and Workhouse Records. The history of workhouses in the UK is a typically Victorian …
You Don't Know Jack lives again
A long, long time ago in the early days of ‘multimedia’ most games available were stilted click-throughs of badly rendered 3D images. The exception …
Core77 Columnista
I’m very pleased to have been asked to be a columnist for the Core77 blog. It’s been in the works for a few weeks, but my recent trip to Ethiopia …
Mentoring Creative Minds
The current issue of COFA’s Incubate magazine has a piece by me in it called Mentoring Creative Minds, which is a reflection on 15 years of teaching …
Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity
(Picture from Aquent’s E-Fail service) Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for …
Teaching, Learning and Mazes
The COTEN project is gaining momentum and there are some excellent discussions going on. A lot of the conversation is about different teaching and institutional …
Archetypes and Metaphors
There is an interesting piece over at Johnny Holland by Rahul Sen titled Archetypes and Their Use in Mobile UX. It’s probably worth reading it and coming …
Higher Education is about to crash and burn, says Seth
I couldn’t help but agree with Seth Godin’s summary of the coming melt-down in higher education – it’s an almost perfect echo of the themes I …
In the Event of My Death
For my mother’s 70th birthday celebrations, my sister-in-law, Naisha, put together a book of family photos ranging from my mother and father’s …
Come and Study in Luzern, Switzerland!
If you are interested in studying service design or product design, textiles or animage and living amongst some of the freshest air around, we’re …
Not More Products - Uncovering Local Networks
I spent a day last week with Lavrans and Ben from Live|Work putting our brains together for a project we hope will help spread lots of ideas about service …
Creative Waves - COTEN - Call for Participants
When it comes to thinking about higher education designers – or perhaps just design academics – seem to suddenly forget everything they know. We teach the …