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We often forget the cast and crew
I wasn’t particularly excited for the eclipse. Despite my building’s rooftop being directly in the line of totality, my feelings were veering on indifference. My partner felt otherwise. She had bought us glasses and made sure our schedule was clear. When the time finally came, we went up to the terrace where some neighbours were…
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Focus on how you work with AI, not what it answers
90% of the value I derive from ChatGPT comes from thinking about my prompt. In forcing myself to think out loud and give instructions to a responsive system, it gives me clarity. The response from ChatGPT almost becomes irrelevant. This doesn’t work as effectively if I were to write into an empty notepad. That’s because…
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Navigating the Open Waters of an Early-Stage Product
I’ve been sharing videos and links to the tool we’re building called Flota. At the surface, it’s a new interface for instructors to create agendas. Yet our hope is to improve the experience of creating in-class sessions… So how do we know an agenda builder is the right place to start? This is the meta…
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The ex-CEO of Waze was preaching to the startup choir
Last week, I read the article by Noam Bardin, ex-CEO of Waze, on why he stayed so long at Google. In it, he states that his experience selling Waze to Google proved to him that it’s difficult for startups to operate within a large corporation without clashes over culture and governance. Like many people working…
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Understand COVID media engagement with a simple mental model
Throughout the pandemic, the most reliable source of information has been the scientists and medical community, and yet we continue to get two levels of filtration between the best source and ourselves. The first filter is the government and the second is the media. The government distorts it one way, the media distorts it another,…
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Crowdsourcing Opinions
After finishing a book, movie, or game, what do you do? Personally I find myself rushing to the internet and looking up reviews and analyses. It’s a fantastic, and often free, way to get so much more out of the content you just experienced. However, I have started to notice a downside to this. There…
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Reading about Creativity… Again
Creativity is one of those subjects that’s been so over-explored from an anecdotal and pseudoscientific perspective that it’s become increasingly hard to recommend any content about it. In many ways, the topic is as dead as it is nascent. Millions of artists and philosophers have written about the subject and a dearth of websites have…
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I watched a YouTube tutorial. Now what?
My YouTube feed is 40% tutorials, 40% tech reviews and 20% cute animals. I consume more tutorials than would be useful, particularly in music making — which is funny because I do not make music. You can probably relate to this, because it’s something the whole world does. In fact, “how-to” is one of the most searched…
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Stepping Out of Media Overload
In April 2020, a friend and I decided to start a digital media literacy initiative. We wanted to combat the rampant misinformation happening at the start of COVID-19. The idea was to infiltrate people’s social media feeds with thoughtful posts about how to approach current topics. Thus, ThinkFirst News was born. At the onset, this…
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Moving beyond documents, slides, and spreadsheets
This article was originally posted on Wrk.com on July 15, 2020. In 1896, Nikola Tesla created an A.C. power generating system at Niagara Falls that helped generate power for swathes of cities in the North American manufacturing heartlands. Nowadays, our understanding of innovation may contain very different inputs and outputs to those at the turn…
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An email on becoming a design consultant in the startup world
Recently a UX designer emailed me asking for my thoughts on moving out of the corporate world and becoming a design consultant in the startup world. Below is a lightly modified version of a 1,000-word email I responded with. If you are a designer in Montreal or elsewhere looking to work with startups, I hope…
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ThinkFirst News
Have you ever read an online article and wondered, “Who the f wrote this shit?” I feel this everyday. This project started off after a critical mass of garbage information started being thrown around during COVID-19. Despite the tons of fact checkers and great information out there, it wasn’t reaching my own personal networks. I…