Work / Talks
An argument that only works with the room in it.
A guide is for looking something up. A talk is for changing a mind once, in forty-five minutes, in front of people who can interrupt — which makes it a different object, built to a different shape. Both of these read as articles afterwards, but neither was written as one.
What a talk is here
Not a document with the sentences taken out, and not speaker notes with pictures on them. Each of these is one argument: a claim, the thing the audience believes instead, the evidence that separates them, and a turn somewhere in the middle where the argument stops being about the subject and starts being about the listener.
Each is built around a small number of moments where the room has to commit before it is told the answer. People predict, out loud, and are usually wrong — and being wrong in public is what earns the next forty minutes. That is the one thing a talk can do that a page cannot, and it is the reason these exist as talks rather than as essays.
Everything in both is drawn from published, documented cases. No employer, client, or internal work appears in either, and every number can be traced to a source. Each is one file that presents as a deck and reads as an article, so the version you hand to someone who was not in the room is the same object they sat through.
Why I give them
Both came out of the same problem. Design is one of the few things in an organisation that everyone has an opinion about and almost nobody has a definition for. Asked what designers do, most people describe the last third of the job — the part where something is made to look and behave well. That is not a question of respect. It decides which meetings design is in, and by the time a thing arrives at the layer most people picture, the decisions with the largest consequences have already been taken by somebody who was not thinking of them as design decisions at all.
So one of these makes the general case and the other makes it for educational technology specifically. They share exhibits, and they share a move: before arguing that design is worth anything, both throw out the evidence usually used to prove it. The famous returns-on-design numbers do not survive being looked up, and saying so in the first five minutes costs nothing and buys everything after it.
That is the same reflex behind the guides. If I am going to ask someone to act on a claim, they are entitled to know how much the claim is worth.
Available
The talks
Both open in their own tab. Press R at any point to stop presenting and start reading — it is the same document either way.
What design is, and what designers do
Design is a category of decision that sets what a system makes easy, hard, and impossible — and most of it is made by people who do not hold the job title. What the decisions cost when nobody owns them, what the evidence says design is worth, where that evidence falls apart, and the question each role around the table is actually responsible for.
Open the talkZero is an average
Forty years of research finds that educational technology has an average effect of roughly nothing. The average is the least interesting thing about it — the spread around it is enormous, and design accounts for a good deal of the spread. What that means for what to build, what to measure before it ships, and what to stop citing.
Open the talk