Personal
Things I do for their own sake.
These are not hobbies in the sense of filling time. They are where I get to be a beginner, and where the feedback is immediate and unsentimental. Most of what I believe about designed experience I first learned at a table, losing.
Mahjong
Singapore mahjong is a scoring system pretending to be a tile game. A game held together almost entirely by undocumented convention is a small, complete study in tacit knowledge — and a decent argument for why documentation is design work.
mahjong.geraldajam.comContract bridge
The best-designed information problem I know of that you can finish in an evening. Bidding is a constrained language — a small set of legal utterances, all public, all ambiguous — and both partners have to build a shared picture using only those, while two opponents listen in.
Cartoons
A single panel has to carry setup, character, and turn simultaneously, which makes it the most unforgiving compression problem in visual communication — and the closest thing I know to a diagram with a sense of humour.
Trying new tech
I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them, on the theory that you cannot evaluate a tool from its documentation. Most attempts do not survive, which is the point — the fast, cheap failure is the finding.
Making espresso
Espresso is a process-control problem you can run twice before breakfast. Everything that matters happens inside an opaque basket in twenty-five seconds, so you are never observing the process — only its output, and only after it is too late to change anything.
Pursuits is what I do. The library is what I point to — other people’s work I would recommend. Mahjong, bridge, cartoons, and coffee appear in both, correctly: one is the practice, the other is what taught me. Reflections are the third thing: what I make of where I have been. Inspirations are the fourth: other people’s ideas after I have had a go at them.
Inspirations
Things I found, and could not leave alone
Other people’s ideas after I have had a go at them. The source is named first, because the idea was never mine; the build is what it turned into in my hands.
A set of five
The field guides
One mind, one group, one exchange, one set of defaults, one field. The five are built on one engine and meant to be read together: a bias is something that happens to you, a collective fallacy is something a structure does to everyone in it, a faulty argument is a move somebody makes, a working default is a rule someone chose on purpose, and a false certainty is a true finding held with more confidence than it earned. Nothing is repeated between them. Each opens as a deck; press R for the reading version, where Appendix A is an A to Z index of every entry, so a name you already have takes one click to find. The fifth, and its index, sit behind a password.
The cognitive bias field guide
Pitfalls in individual thinking: what one mind does to itself, from attention and memory to how it judges other people.
Open the guideThe collective fallacies field guide
Pitfalls in collective interaction: what happens to reasoning once more than one mind is involved.
Open the guideThe faulty arguments field guide
Pitfalls in collective decision making: the moves that derail a discussion, and what to say back.
Open the guideThe working defaults field guide
Rules chosen on purpose: the razors, laws and principles people use to think well, and where each one misleads.
Open the guideThe false certainties field guide
Pitfalls in a field’s own beliefs: what education holds true about learning that the evidence does not carry, and why it cannot tell.
Open the guideA set of nine
The phrasebooks
Four toolkits in nine volumes, for people who write, brief and review work they were never trained to make. One names what happens in the words, one on the page, one behind the screen and one in front of a camera, a microphone or an audience. Each term is defined once, in the toolkit that owns it. Each volume opens as a deck; press R for the reading version, where Appendix A is an A to Z of every term in the volume.
Diagnosis and diction
The instruments that explain why communication works, and the moves of situation, economy, clarity and register.
Open the volumeCadence and candour
The moves of arrangement, emphasis, delivery, candour and logic, and the seven-pass review.
Open the volumePapers and protocols
Document genres, paper labels, attribution rules, levels of editing and workplace shorthand.
Open the volumeGlyphs and grids
Words for judging a page, and for its letters, lines, layout, images and colour.
Open the volumeProofs and pixels
Decks, charts, design process, print production, sign-off, editorial marks, publishing and interface components.
Open the volumeBuilds and branches
Words for judging software, and for how it is built, versioned, tested, shipped, connected and secured.
Open the volumeRunbooks and roadmaps
How software is run, fixed, planned and delivered, the patterns behind it, and the words that mean something else to engineers.
Open the volumeFrames and footage
Words for judging, then the camera, the edit, light, sound, photography, animation, production and live events.
Open the volumeCurtains and critics
Theatre, music and sound design, scripts, Foley and performance, the words for analysis, and the pairs most often confused.
Open the volumeA set of four
The playbooks
Design methods for education and edtech, in four volumes, in the order a project meets them: frame and discover, define and ideate, prototype and test, then deliver and sustain, with three tracks used at any stage. 223 methods, each with what it is, its steps, the usual output, time and people, and a template to copy. Each volume opens as a deck; press R for the reading version, where Appendix A is an A to Z of every name in the set, other names included. Every template is also an A3 worksheet in the poster view.
Scopes and Soundings
Framing the work and finding out: the methods of the frame and discover stages.
Open the volumeClusters and Concepts
Making sense of what was found, and generating options: the methods of the define and ideate stages.
Open the volumeProps and Pilots
Making ideas real enough to test, and testing them: the methods of the prototype and test stages.
Open the volumeHandoffs and Habits
Delivering, sustaining and running the practice: deliver and sustain, the three tracks, and the software.
Open the volumeA set of two
The Long Way Home
What experts in danger mostly know is a short list of instincts to override. Loose Change is tradecraft: the instincts spies, con artists and pickpockets use against you. Dry Matches is fieldcraft: the instincts that are simply wrong when the danger is physical. Twenty-one files across the two, each one rule to decide in advance, with the case behind it, a drill and a grade for the evidence. Each opens as a deck at night; press T for day and R for the reading version. A few things in each are hidden on purpose.
Loose Change
Tradecraft: how spies, con artists, hackers and pickpockets actually work, and the small rules that keep an ordinary person out of their way.
Open the bookDry Matches
Fieldcraft: fire, water, food, navigation, the city, first aid and machines, and the instincts that fail when it matters.
Open the bookReflections
What I make of it
A stretch of my own life, written down once it was over and the lesson had settled. The experience is the point, and it is mine.