When ease of use is not ease of learning
How might we reduce unnecessary interface friction without removing the cognitive effort that contributes to learning?
In preparation
Practice
Structure teaches, whether or not anyone designed it to.
A room, an interface, and a set of rules all shape behaviour before anyone intends them to. My work is about doing that deliberately: investigating how spatial design, technology, and media come together, and translating what holds up into something a school or a team can actually use. What follows is organised by what I work on and how I think about it, rather than by project — the principle travels further than the artefact does.
How I work
From evidence to changed practice
Research rarely tells us exactly what to build. Practice requires moving from observation to explanation, from evidence to judgement, and from judgement into forms that survive real constraints.
- 01Readthe situation
- 02Explainthe mechanism
- 03Examinethe evidence
- 04Judgeunder constraint
- 05Translateinto form
- 06Observewhat happens
- 07Transferwhat was learned
Domains
What I currently think
Each domain page sets out the question, the position, the distinctions that do the work, and what I would still argue about. The first is the frame the others sit inside.
Learning spaces
How might space, participation, tools, and routines support the forms of learning intended?
Immersive and extended reality
When does an embodied or spatial digital experience add educational value?
Interactive learning experiences
How should learners act, receive feedback, and build explanations inside an interactive system?
Media and multimedia for learning
How should words, visuals, and sound combine so that media clarifies rather than distracts?
Evidence of learning
What can the learner now understand or do that they could not reliably understand or do before?
Designing collective thinking
What conditions let a group think better than its members would alone?
Practice cases
Ideas encountering reality
Principles become more useful when they encounter constraints.
Designing the room around the learning
A learning environment designed from the activity outward, rather than from the furniture inward.
Read the caseFrom educational principle to usable resource
What a principle has to become before a teacher can use it on a Monday.
In preparation
Why a good intervention changes when it scales
What happened to a working idea once many schools began to adapt it.
In preparation
Guides
Ideas made operational
A guide asks: if this idea matters, what should someone actually do differently? The guides have their own section, with a map of the craft and six pathways through the collection.
Notes
Arguments being developed
Notes usually begin with a tension, observation, or distinction that seems worth examining more closely. Each ends on what transferred.
2026 · 09The room is an interfaceA classroom organises what learners can do the way a screen does, so it can be designed and questioned like one2026 · 09The robot that became a social contractWe set out to automate rearranging classrooms, and testing showed the hard problem was agreeing how the room is used2026 · 09The unglamorous leversThe cheapest items in a classroom change behaviour most, because each removes a specific friction or dissolves a specific norm2026 · 09Build as you goMost school spaces should be built in increments, trialled and extended as use cases emerge, except the things that must be done properly once2026 · 09A myth is a finding that travelledMost of what education gets wrong began as something true, and the fix is to measure how far it has travelled2026 · 09Every rule of thumb has an opposite numberA rule of thumb is right inside its conditions and wrong outside them, and the conditions can be named2026 · 09A catalogue of faults is half an instrumentCatching a bad argument settles nothing. Arguing better is a short set of moves, and they can be taught2026 · 09Nobody in the room has to be wrongCollective work has failure modes of its own, and more minds do not cancel them2026 · 09A bias is a design briefAwareness is the weakest counter, and the product controls the conditions2026 · 09Ease of use is not ease of learningThe effort that feels like failure is the effort that teaches2026 · 09What design is, and how it gets practised in edtechDesign is a category of decision, not a layer added at the end2026 · 09A principle is not a findingA canon that cannot grade itself is a reading list2026 · 07A design system is not a component libraryComponents scale reuse; principles scale judgement2026 · 06A thinkpiece is a designed objectA writing genre with a job, an audience, and a failure mode2026 · 05Design for translationResearch → principles → tools → changed practice
All notes Talks
Talks given
A guide is for looking something up. A talk is for putting an idea in front of people who can push back on it.
Good work does not speak for itself
For anyone whose work ends in a decision someone else makes
Open the talkDesigning for learning
For people who build learning products and are not educators
Open the talkWhat design is, and what designers do
For anyone who works alongside designers
Open the talkZero is an average
For people who design educational technology
Open the talkToolkit
A toolkit for seeing situations differently.
Futuring expands what could be. Complexity changes how we understand interaction. Different ways of thinking change how a situation can be framed. I am exploring how these practices might combine into a practical toolkit for educational change.
Explore the toolkitMoves 01 to 05 of 10
- 01 Surface the assumptionWhat must currently be believed for the present arrangement to make sense?
- 02 Change the boundaryWhat happens when we include actors, effects, or timescales currently treated as outside the problem?
- 03 Change the scaleDoes the problem look different at the learner, classroom, school, system, or societal level?
- 04 Find the feedbackWhat consequence of an action later changes the conditions that produced the action?
- 05 Look for delayWhich effects occur too late to influence the decisions that caused them?
Singapore