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Sharing on social media sucks because we do it too much
I had a chilling thought yesterday about the effects of excessive exposure to everyone’s thoughts online: It’s easy to mock the excited posts of people celebrating new jobs and enjoying a small moment of victory in an otherwise difficult life. I used to dedicate my entire LinkedIn to laughing at these seemingly vapid posts. But…
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Improving marketplace UX by getting more users
Improving marketplace UX means getting more users You can improve marketplace UX with better search and helping users make offers. But the real secret? Having more people 📈. In our latest YouTube video, we did a UX comparison of Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji (a Canadian marketplace like Craigslist or eBay). Below we’ve summarized our learnings.…
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The challenge with ranting as comedy
For a moment it seemed like ranting could have been a comedic avenue for me. Friends found it funny and I got a high from going down a quality rant about the most irrelevant things. Alternatively, ranting for an audience is a difficult task. Audiences can perceive the performer as shallow or unnecessarily harsh. For…
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Build your own training wheels for emotional intelligence development
Quite often, the problem with tools and workshops that promise to develop your “creativity” or “design thinking” is that they get boiled down to something methodical and prescriptive. The explosion in popularity for these frameworks comes from our expectation that future generations and work environments will be cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and elusively “innovative”. This has resulted…
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Getting tools and techniques is not the future of entrepreneurship training
Entrepreneurship has never been more popular, yet somehow there seems to be more confusion than ever on what it takes to make a good entrepreneur. Here, in the city of Montreal alone, the talk of incubators, next generation universities, innovation-driven curriculum, and government grants and funding, is at an all time high. There’s a race…
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How to make friends in August
I woke up this morning feeling a bit blue and decided to write a quick article about the beauty of the phrase “Hello world.” It was going to be a piece about the death of innocence on the internet and generally revolve around the theme of the death of society and happiness. In my conviction…
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The state of Speculative Supply
In 2016, I embarked on a project called Speculative Supply that was meant to be a go-to source for tools built on speculation. This was fueled by my final project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design which was intended to be an educational tool with speculation as the core mechanic. Things have slowed down…
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Unlearning is the next step after your university degree
To this day, millions of students still walk into a university with the hope that their degree will not only get them a job, but will prepare them sufficiently for it. The common realizations post-graduation tend to be: Finding jobs that are up to your qualifications is incredibly hard Once you’ve gotten a job, even…
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The Canadian entrepreneurial hustle
Sitting in the StartUp Canada Awards #StartupCanAwards event in Montreal, it’s hard not to feel proud of the cold, northern country that could. The pride isn’t necessarily directed at the actual achievements, but rather at the way those achievements are celebrated. Whether or not the victories are objectively big or small, the event is carried…
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How optimizing for every single thing can lead to ultimate sadness
The incessant need to find the best How optimizing for every single thing can lead to ultimate sadness There’s a phenomenon that is likely only found in the first world. I’m not sure if any psychologists, linguists, or anthropologists have coined a term for this behaviour, but it has four essential components: A desire to…
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Searching for the door knob museum
It is likely that many of you reading this have never heard of any door knob museums, let alone being of their existence entirely. Door handle — Wikipedia The location of the door handle along the horizontal axis on the door may vary between a few inches or centimeters away… This is a device that men around…
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The trouble with assuming “innovation” is understood
At Particles Design Lab and District 3, we are constantly having debates about the definitions and roles of design and innovation in society. These are the musings of our Design Strategist, Charlie Gedeon. In light of this article that says something can be called an innovation only after it has proven to add value, I…