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 three
The field guides
One mind, one group, one exchange. The three 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, and a faulty argument is a move somebody makes. 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 cognitive bias field guide
The Decision Lab’s catalogue of biases, rebuilt as a field guide and then widened until it matched the longest lists in circulation. Every one of the 234 entries was checked against three books and given two new sections: what it means for learning, and what it means for a learning product. The evidence is graded in place wherever a popular finding is shakier than its reputation.
Open the guideThe collective fallacies field guide
The companion on what goes wrong once more than one mind is involved. A committee, a target, a pilot and a procurement board fail in ways no individual bias explains, so this collects 253 of those failures, written from the primary literature and public inquiry reports. Each entry has a documented case, the early signs, the counter-move and what it means for a school system, and a tag saying whether it rests on a finding, a model, a law or a maxim.
Open the guideThe faulty arguments field guide
The third guide, on the exchange itself: 153 moves in nineteen families. Most named fallacies are good arguments used where their questions fail, so every entry gives the legitimate version first, the point at which it breaks, a documented instance and the words to say back. A tag on each says what kind of wrong it is, and the last part is a repair kit rather than a summary.
Open the guideReflections
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.