Things The West Wing — and its inquisitorial companion podcast — might teach us — There’s a good podcast called The West Wing Thing that just finished up its run. Each week, writer Josh Olson (A History of Violence)¹ and comedian Dave Anthony (The Dollop) watch one episode of The West Wing and then draw and quarter its politics. I was nineteen when The West…

Visual communication and COVID-19 — A design colleague working with kids in mandatory quarantine asked for suggestions as to ways to gamify the process of giving children coronavirus nasal swab tests, preferably using paper (as it’s disposable). This was my first thought. If you’d like to use it with kids yourself but don’t draw…

What do designers look like to “normal” people, and how does it affect their work’s impact? — I read David Graeber’s recent piece The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’,which was not about design thinking. It, nevertheless, brought my thinking around to “approaches to design”, and to the way we communicate about design. The part of the piece that shot a flare…

A Squishface Studio exhibition of “serious” comics/graphics — Justify my love The time is long past that “comics” as an art/writing/communication medium needs to be justified artistically or compared to others. Which is better, poetry or paintings? Which is for “smart” people, film or books? Stupid, right? Yet, this recent tweet from Leela Corman: “Comics aren’t literature” is a bad-faith argument…

On October 6 I’m running a pretty exciting design event in Melbourne called xDiscipline. The idea is: hear from and work with our special guests — Dr. Steven Curry, Tanja Kovac and Geoff Paine — with the goal of learning how their disciplines can inform your own. In the lead-up…

On October 6 I’m running a pretty exciting design event in Melbourne called xDiscipline. The idea is: hear from and work with our special guests — philosopher/ethicist Dr. …

And why did I decide to put on my own “design” event? — In 2017 I was privileged enough to deliver a talk at UX Australia with my colleague Luke Watson. It was about our experience design work in IAG’s Digital Labs division. We ended this talk by stressing the need for diversity in design teams. “A team of designers, even exciting innovative…

In human-centred design we learn from individuals through observation or interviews. We’re often told to “let go of your biases”, but what does that mean in practice? — Our team is interviewing about ten people today. My interviewing partner and I will tackle three of these interviews together. We’re trying to learn about how communities can be supported to prepare for disasters. The subject of our first interview, “Donna”, sits down, having been ushered in by a colleague…

Things I tell people when they ask me about visualisation work — I’ve been asked for advice on sketchnoting/visual scribing lately so I thought I’d roll what I often tell people into a post. Illustrations are from a scribe I did for the Natural Capital Summit in Brisbane (part of Climate Week QLD last week), thanks to the teams at ClimateWorks Australia…