It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been doing predominantly ‘guerrilla’ design research. For me, this means testing in the field with a minimum of time, budget and fuss so that this kind of activity and the insight it provides is available to pretty much any client/budget/timeframe.
One of the first challenges for guerrilla design [...]

It’s been more than a year now since I first wrote about Ambient Intimacy, and in that year it seems a whole lot has gone on. Twitter continues to be the predominant micro-blogging(?) platform although Google now owns Jaiku. Presence continues to be compelling, yet there hasn’t been the growth in ‘life streaming’ that perhaps [...]

I got a call from my bank, HSBC, the other morning. The call started something like this.
Rob: ‘Hi, this is Rob from HSBC. Before I can continue this conversation I need to confirm some security details with you. Can you tell me your date of birth please’.
Leisa: ‘You must be kidding Rob. I have no [...]

I had a bunch of interesting conversations with people at the recent Future of Web Apps conference in London. This is more and more my favourite thing about conferences… talking to people and seeing what you end up talking about repeatedly… what are the themes that just emerge from the zeitgeist, with or without any [...]

I was very happy to have the opportunity to hop up and share my thoughts on Ambient Intimacy at the Future of Web Apps conference in London yesterday. The slides are above.
This is a bit of a move on from the talk I presented earlier in the year at Reboot - a little lighter on [...]

Now that we’re all super excited about social media, and every man and his dog wants to do *something* to do with social networking, it seems a pertinent time to ask… but why?
Why does the world need your product or service to include ’something social’? Why on earth would you want to create a *new* [...]

If you’re designing a social application at the moment, think about how you can be quiet.
This is just one of a million pleas from socially networked people everywhere who are going to great efforts to manage the noise that their networked applications are generating at times when they really need some quiet time to focus.
Some [...]

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston at the moment and hopped up bright and early to give a presentation at 8am this morning. I was talking about Social Project Management, but those who’ve seen or read the washing machine presentation will probably find a fair few similarities between this presentation and that old [...]

So, something that I’ve always been quite fascinated with, is the way that people ‘perform’ themselves in virtual space… consciously or not. It all started by reading some Sherry Turkle while I was at university and has simmered away ever since.
In the ‘olden days’ of social technologies, creating your ’self’ online involved a fair amount [...]

Before I file away (or accidentally lose) my Reboot notebook I thought I’d transcribe a few of the handwritten notes I took whilst listening to some of the presentations I attended. Some of them are my paraphrasing… I’ll put quote marks around those that I’m fairly confident are verbatim quotes.
(Note that the number of notes [...]