Doctor's Note

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

Teaching Service Design at Lucerne School of Art and Design

Regular readers of Playpen may have notice things have been somewhat quiet around here recently. There are two reasons for this. One is that Twitter has made an …

How Can Graphic Design Help Save The Planet?

I’m very pleased to have been asked by AGDA to speak at the first Design A Better World conference in Sydney with the tricky topic, “How Can Graphic …

Sparks - Playful Innovation

Philips Design has created a boardgame called Spark to help generate insights. It looks like it is a pretty simple premise – there are a set of characters …

Confusing Information with the Form

Lovely video from design and research consultancy MAYA on the difference between information and the form we give it. I came across this on David …

The Little Man in the Box

All of us anthropomorphise our machines, perhaps no more so than the car and the computer. Hi, A Real Human Interface from Multitouch Barcelona (an interaction …

Schematic and Public Multitouch Social Interaction

Joel Johnson’s exclusive (on Vimeo?) video and interview with the folks at Schematic about their new touchwall shows them dealing with some interesting …

Social Play

I’ve just finished up a chapter in my PhD about social play. Most of it is about online interaction, but quite a bit is about how to bring strangers …