Category Archives: work

Jan 21 2026
1 Comment
socio-cultural, work

Rural Britain, Meet Level 5

I love driving, and when I’m out with my son – mostly around suburban Surrey and onto the A- and M- road network – we talk about what the future looks like with self-driving L4 and L5 cars. Will it make journeys quicker? Will we be safer, calmer, more efficient with the bots driving us around? What will the road network look like with enhanced and standardised signage, markings and adapted junctions. It’s nerdy but it’s fun to talk about this stuff and question how a lot of the almost sci-fi might work in practice.

But if you want to understand what L5 autonomy actually means. You can’t start on a motorway. You have to start on a Cornish lane that was ‘designed’ in the reign of Henry VIII by a (let’s assume) man who’s only measurement was ‘avoid straight lines’ and who’s only measurement system was a stick of some agreed length.

My go-to example is the run from a nice Roseland peninsula spot to a tiny fishing village. It’s stunning in the way Cornwall so often is: scenery that makes you consider leaving real life behind – and roads that immediately remind you why you can’t. The lanes are absurdly narrow, bordered by stone hedges that are unyielding fortifications, meeting another car or tractor here is less ‘driving’ than an improvised referendum on who’s reversing today and how much they value their paintwork, tyres and helmsmanship.

This is useful because the autonomy conversation still starts in the wrong places, with the wrong visuals. It starts with wide West Coast roads, clear lines, predictable junctions and a general sense that the built environment is a cooperative partner in the project of motion. In California, “self-driving looks like this” tends to mean something very rational: geometry, visibility, lanes you could land a small plane on and junctions laid out with acres of asphalt and a basic respect for human comprehension.

Naturally, Cornwall is not like this. Cornwall – and plenty of rural Britain – is a place where the road network seems to have been draped over the topography by monks.

The autonomy world has a dull phrase that explains how it expects the world to be: Operational Design Domain (ODD) – the conditions a system is designed to operate within. If you’re keen it’s SAE J3016. The phrase is clinically unsexy, which is part of its charm. It keeps the conversation out of the breathless nonsense that blooms around new technology.

It also implies something people in the industry – notably the people selling you cars – dislike admitting: autonomy is geographical. It exists only where the environment cooperates. And, dear reader, Cornwall does not cooperate, not due to budgets or intransigence – simply because of history.

To illustrate, let’s take a lane standoff: Two human drivers meet head-on and resolve it using social protocols that are not codified. There’s the micro-creep forward, a pause that signals “I’m thinking” or the eye contact that says “I know, this is ridiculous but I’m not reversing into a bramble hedge and a fence post for your Audi Q7”. There’s local knowledge about a passing place behind you that doesn’t look like one unless you’ve been raised on these lanes and have developed the spatial instincts of a maze rat. Then there’s a moral arithmetic too: you’re closer to the wider bit; you’re in the smaller car; you’ve got five people in the back; you look like you’re here for the week and have brought three paddleboards.

Now swap both of these cars for L5 ones and you hit the awkward truth: this route isn’t asking for better navigation, it’s asking for social negotiation. In this context it’s easy to say: the vehicles will simply communicate, agree a plan, one will reverse. The other will wait. Like a pair of Nordic adults having a calm, consensual conversation about responsibility.

Except you’re on a lane with hedges made of rock and 5G signal as powerful as a hamster’s yawn. Even if future communication standards are enhanced, a system that is predicated on connectivity in order to behave sanely in every lane it might find itself in, it’s not “drive anywhere”, it’s “drive where the network hasn’t gone for a lie-down in the sun”.

So assume the vehicles have no helpful network. They must now reason locally. Each one must remember where it has been: the last few hundred metres, where it can reverse, where the lane widens, where sightlines recede, where the verge turns into ‘wet grass hiding a half-metre ditch’. That rolling spatial memory must be table stakes for any serious autonomy.

But memory only gives you so many options. The trouble starts when both vehicles are doing the same thing at the same time, under uncertainty, with no shared authority. If both decide to be cautious (and there are good reasons legally and ethically why they would) you can get a stalemate that looks faintly ridiculous to the human passengers and is, in engineering terms, entirely rational. Two polite robots facing each other, neither wanting to be the first to commit to a manoeuvre that might be unsafe, both waiting for clarity that never arrives. It’s Britain but with fewer apologies and more deadlock.

Now, add the more realistic scenario in the nearer term: one vehicle is automated and the other is driven by a human, a 65-year-old local in a Twingo who’s reversed more cars than you’ve had hot dinners and is perfectly prepared to perform the full choreography of rural right-of-way: gesticulation, eyebrow work, and a hand wave that means “you go”, except it also means “I’m going,” and possibly “you London berk, what are you doing down here?”.

A machine can of course see a hand move. It can classify posture. It can assign probabilities to intent. None of that makes the gesture binding. It must rely only on certainties: where the car is, and what it’s actually doing. The moment you treat informal human signals as authoritative, you’re building a system that can be socially steered into unsafe decisions, which is an inviting prospect for every bored teenager and every slightly unhinged delivery driver in Britain.

So, the automated vehicle does what safety-critical systems do when faced with ambiguity: it becomes conservative. It waits. It yields. It declines to commit until the world becomes clearer and signals replace noise. That’s sensible. It’s also exactly how one ends up with a driverless taxi parked in a single-track lane while the rest of Cornwall ages around it.

There’s another detail we humans grasp instantly: the hidden queue. When you decide to reverse, you’re not only deciding for yourself. You’re making an anxious decision for whatever is behind you, unseen beyond the bend. This is why a simple standoff can turn into a fun village event. A human driver will check mirrors, listen for tyres on gravel, remember the vehicle that turned off behind them a few minutes back and estimate whether this reversal will trigger a chain reaction. A driverless vehicle can’t conjure knowledge of what’s behind the bend unless it can perceive it directly or receive it from sensors elsewhere. To solve this elegantly you need awareness beyond what any single vehicle has. At which point you’re edging toward traffic coordination rather than autonomy: the road as a managed system rather than a stage set for individual decision-making.

This isn’t just a Cornwall problem, rather obviously. Rural Sweden has winter roads with passing places and visibility that vanishes in a sneeze. Japan has mountain villages where lanes are carved by an ancient, determined stream. Rural Ireland is essentially Cornwall with different biscuits. The recurring theme is that it’s the environment that sets the terms. Places built around informal human negotiation are awkward customers for systems that require explicit rules and verifiable intent.

So what happens, what can I tell my son will happen? The answer is mundane. It’s a patchwork. Autonomy that operates confidently on roads that are legible and well-maintained, and then becomes limited, constrained or frankly unavailable in places where the geometry and social protocol defeats it. Sometimes there will be upgrades: defined passing places treated as an asset, clearer priority rules at pinch points, better delineation. Maybe even codified behaviour – a three-flash signal ‘I will yield’, as an example. Sometimes the answer will be operational: remote support when a vehicle gets stuck, or routing that avoids the lane because it cannot guarantee progress. Sometimes the answer will be more bluntly: this road requires a human driver.

None of this betrays the vision, it’s simply what happens when technology meets the world as it actually is: layered, improvised, nuanced and historically messy, full of little social contracts that nobody codified because they didn’t need to.

Cornwall in this sense does us a favour. It stops us pretending and evangelising that autonomy is simple a question of sensors and clever computing. It reminds us that driving is a cultural practice. Some parts of the network are (beautifully) engineered systems. Others are negotiated spaces with hedges and drivers with grudges. Level 5 will thrive where the world behaves like the former. Where it behaves like the latter we’ll either change the road, constrain the autonomy, or just accept that the medieval cart track remains one of the last places a human is still the best interface.

AI: I used AI for the tags, the excerpt, image generation, and a light sub-edit. The ideas, references, observations, and anecdotes are mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 09 2025
1 Comment
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part Two

What happens when the system finally learns to listen.

Last week in Part One, I described why Christmas shopping feels hostile, why even the most basic purchase turns into a strange performance of archaeology, jargon and filters masquerading as understanding. The real problem wasn’t the products but the machinery. The fiction that a PLP grid is somehow an acceptable translation layer between human intent and retail stock.

This week is the other half of the story: the thing that replaces it.

Because the truth is, we’ve spent twenty years designing for systems that never deserved that level of obedience. We pretended the homepage was the grand entrance, the digital lobby with its scented candles and seasonal banners. We treated it like the flagship store: polished, high-stakes, endlessly debated at internal stakeholder meetings. Meanwhile, almost no one arrived through it, or if they did, they were there for a split second. Most people dropped in sideways, via Google, a WhatsApp link, an email, or a moment of panic at 11 p.m. The homepage was the UX and UI theatre we performed for ourselves and our clients.

Agentic systems make that fiction impossible to sustain. They don’t care about your reception desk and your neatly prioritised way finding. They don’t even see it. They take what you mean, “something thoughtful, about forty quid, she hates clutter, nothing scented” and drop you straight into the one, tiny corner of the site where the decision will live or die. A place that, inconveniently, most retailers still treat as a functional afterthought: the product-detail page.

A minimalist Scandinavian study at dusk, softly lit by a small desk lamp. Snow falls outside the window. On the wooden desk sits an open laptop showing a clean product page with only a few curated gift suggestions. A small, neatly wrapped present rests beside it, suggesting a calm, intentional shopping experience rather than the usual frantic grid of options.
A glimpse of the future: no endless grids, no filters, no festive panic, just a system that actually starts where you are.

The PDP becomes the real front door because in an agentic journey the start isn’t a place, it’s a sentence.

This is where that old inventory-obsessed model buckles. Catalogue commerce was built on the premise that customers begin at the top and drill down. Agentic commerce begins at intent and works sideways. The sitemap is your fiction, not theirs. The system no longer needs your categories. It needs your clarity.

Be under no illusion though, this ain’t easy. This only works if the agent can explain itself. When a system gives you two options instead of two hundred, you need to know why. Not academically, emotionally. Why this jacket and not the other one? Why this feels like her. Why this fits your mental model of who she is. The explanation is the reassurance loop. Without it, the whole thing becomes another opaque machine; efficient, yes, but untrustworthy in all the ways that matter.

And then there’s the serendipity problem. Efficiency is addictive, but clinical. If we strip out every detour, we drain the pleasure along with the friction. The answer isn’t a return to the grid; it’s controlled looseness. A suggestion or two just off-axis. Something adjacent. Not twelve rows of “you may also like” tat, just enough to keep the experience human. Discovery without the search-and-filter trauma.

None of this is a theoretical exercise for me. I genuinely spent years trying to push natural-language intent into car retail at JLR, long before the technology was mature enough to meet the ambition. I saw how people really shopped: not by wheelbase or trim code, but by anxiety, context, and use-case. “Capable in the mud.” “Seven-seater that doesn’t look ridiculous.” “Can get all the family crap in it for Cornwall, without a roof box.” All perfectly rational human requests – treated as nonsense by the old machinery. The ideas weren’t wrong. They were simply early.

Now the technology has finally caught up. And with it, the entire structure of how we design retail subtly shifts. From catalogue to conversation. From homepage theatre to product truth. From filters to language. From the warehouse to the person.

None of this saves Christmas, of course. But it does save us from the annual pantomime of pretending that people enjoy buying gifts and products more generally through a system that refuses to understand how they think or consume any of the deeper context that matters. The future isn’t more choice. It isn’t more filters. It isn’t even more intelligence.

It’s fit.

Fit between intent and suggestion.
Fit between the context you’re in and the thing you’re shown.
Fit between the human messiness of December and the machinery that finally stops treating you like a clumsy clinical user story.

Christmas shopping isn’t a test of skill. It’s a test of whether the system knows how to listen. And for the first time in a long time, it might.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, the post excerpt, image generation and some sub-editing. Ideas, references, and anecdotes are all mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 04 2025
work

Christmas Shopping Observations, Part One.

Why Christmas shopping feels hostile, and why ‘catalogue commerce’ makes it worse.

December always brings the same rituals. Sitting in front of a website with a sense of mild dread. The kind one reserves for using a train station toilet, or getting into the coffee queue after parkrun. The intended tasks isn’t difficult or unpleasant in theory, just buy something thoughtful for someone you care about, but Christmas shopping always manages to feel like cognitive trench warfare. Retailers would have it as “the season of gifting”, the rest of us call it, problem solving with a shot glass of Baileys.

So, for some context, let’s go back to a couple of of weeks ago when I was trying to get myself a replacement down jacket. A bit like when I was trying to get Jo some new Asics, this wasn’t an extravagant task. It wasn’t even particularly interesting. Just a bit of a like-for-like replacement for a much-abused Rab. All I needed was a sub expedition-grade jacket. Black, simple. I know my sizes, I know I needed about 850+ fill power and I was ambivalent about much else. I had a shortlist of brands I like. But dozens of models, filters that are inconsistent across brands, categories that mean nothing to people outside of the industry and a product hierarchy that is the baffling output of a Content Management System (CMS) that’s been operated by a chimp1.

I wasn’t searching as much as performing archaeology. Sifting through layers and brushing off the irrelevant collateral.

A narrow, snow-dusted street in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan on a muted December afternoon. Warm ochre buildings rise on either side as bundled-up shoppers walk away from the camera. Soft shop-window lights and minimalist Christmas displays glow against the cold, creating a calm, human-scale contrast to typical frantic holiday retail.
The Christmas shopping we think we’re doing, before the dropdown menus, filters, and “Gifts for Her” pages slap us back into reality.


In design terms this is what we might call the Gulf of Execution, or as my colleagues and I at Dare liked to call the Experience Gap: the distance between what a human means and what the system is willing to accept. My intent was simple – “warm, minimalist natural down for standing around on platforms, by sports pitches and walking to the pub” – but the interface insisted I drop that down into a dialect of drop-down, checkboxes and jargonist euphemisms. A human request translated into machine-and-catalogue syntax. Little wonder the whole thing feels like a joyless chore.

And Christmas retail only amplifies this.

Every major high street site trots out its annual performance of “Gifts for Her”, a festival of generic filler: candles, scarves, bath sets, socks. The occasional novelty gift set embossed with typography that looks like it was designed at 4pm on a Friday whilst sucking on a fetid vape. It’s all indexed by price bands: “Under £10”, “Under £50”, “Over £250” – as if women are primarily sorted by budget code rather than, say, personality or taste.

No mother wants another hand cream selection.
No thirty-something woman wants coordinated gloves.
No partner wants to receive something that clearly began life as a procurement exercise.

The whole structure is built around the warehouse, not the person. It’s inventory logic masquerading as emotional intelligence. And the moment you notice it, you can’t unsee it: most “gift guides” reveal almost nothing about the recipient and everything about that the retailer wants to shift.

This is the failure baked-into catalogue commerce. It doesn’t matter which brand you pick; the underlying assumption is the same: that human desire can be expressed through filters, and that personality cab be captured in a category label. It’s tidy, rational and optimised. It’s also completely blind as to what makes shopping human in the first place.

Because real gift-buying begins long before the visit to the website. It begins in the cluttered contradictory emotional territory that sits just outside the browser window: What does she already have? What does she love? What has she told me about? What will she pretend to love? What feels thoughtless? What feels too much? What feels like you didn’t think at all (Hint: anything at Boots that comes in a gift box)? Retail ignores all of this and forces you straight into the grid (what we call the Product Listings Page (PLP) ), as if the process were orderly. Spoiler alert, it never is.

This is why Christmas shopping feels hostile. It’s not that the options are universal bad, just that the interface tries to convince you it understands and reflects your mental model when it plainly does not. Handing you a hundred variants of the same filler and expecting conversion gratitude. Somewhere between the filters, the categories and the bath sets you sense the truth: this isn’t built for you. It’s built to organise the warehouse.

Don’t worry though, there’s a better story coming, and the technology to enable it is finally here. But this isn’t the piece for solutions, it’s about naming the problem plainly as it is and without the retail gloss.

Next time I’ll get on to the other half of the picture: the system-level shift that’s going to quietly rewrite the entire experience from how we search to where the journey really begins.

For now its enough to acknowledge the obvious: Christmas shopping isn’t about solving and indecisiveness problem for dumb consumers. It’s a broken model designed around systems that are not built to reflect how people think, feel or choose, especially in December.

Part Two: How agentic solves this, and more.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and some very light sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

  1. Plot twist. I ended up with the Shackleton Ronne. I browsed online for weeks. I did huge amounts of research and comparison and then I went to the wonderful store on Piccadilly and spoke to a great sales assistant there who worked with me to ensure it was absolutely the right fit and will see me out for prob 5-10 years of use. ↩︎

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Dec 02 2025
work

The world doesn’t need another post on Ai and creativity, but here’s one anyway

Apropos of nothing, I keep circling back to Bjarke Ingels’ throwaway observation he shared recently on Instagram about Ai prompting feeling a bit like briefing a team. You describe an intention, something comes back, you adjust. Anyone who’s spent time in a design or strategy studio recognises that scenario instantly, the loose sketch of an idea, the return volley, the shrug, the “maybe try it with less… erm whatever that is.” It felt like it was a nice clean analogy and I was nodding along.

But a studio isn’t a stochastic mirror. It’s a small society of taste and memory. People remember your last terrible idea. Someone raises an eyebrow when a line of copy looks off or a Figma file has gone fully feral. Someone else brings up the project you swore you’d never repeat. The feedback loop is human, textured, occasionally bruising. There’s judgement, shared reference points, work blue-tac’d up on the walls and a quiet sense of “let’s not embarrass ourselves again.”

This is where Ingels’ analogy starts to wobble. When you brief a human, you’re drawing on their judgement, experience, and the unspoken etiquette of a team. When you brief Ai, it behaves nothing like a junior designer and everything like a very confident autocomplete. It gives you the shape of participation without the substance. A colleague can resist you, encourage you to slow you down, challenge the premise. A (poorly prompted) model can’t. It just accelerates whatever direction you gesture toward, even when said direction is wafer thin.

And that, dear reader, is the seduction.

You type a mood, an intention, a half-formed thought, and it hands you an almost-finished artefact that looks uncannily like something you might have made if you’d only had more time or fewer meetings. The danger isn’t metaphysical (“is it creative?” please f- off, of course it is, have you actually looked up the definition of creative?1). The danger is how easy it becomes to confuse fluency with thought.

In my view, craft survives when you know what good feels like before you’ve picked up the pen or clicked New Document. And that’s the bit people don’t want to hear. The reasoning, the taste, the internal guardrails — they’re all invisible, they take years. Instead we’ve bred a culture (particularly evident on LinkedIn) where commentary stands in for competence, and Ai’s instant coherence makes that substitution feel almost legitimate.

I’m genuinely unmoved by the theological wrangling over whether Ai creates. If it’s parrot or Picasso. It’s a probabilistic parlour trick. What matters is simpler: whether the person using it can spot when the output stops making sense and is in fact bullshitting. Shallow but shiny. A calculator is harmless until someone who never learned to add starts doing the accounts. As the kids say “Same energy”.

Used properly, Ai is a fast way to think aloud, and as a sole practitioner, it’s become one of my favourite ways to work. It’s my pressure valve. A drafting companion. It pushes out variations I’d never have the patience to make by hand. But it only works because I already have a decades long sense of structure and gut instinct, the bit that quietly mutters “nope, that’s wrong”, or more accurately “what the actual fuck?” before I can articulate why. Without that, the tool becomes the teacher, and its blind spots become your worldview. I keep thinking about graduates walking straight into roles heavily emboldened by Ai before their judgement has even started to calcify and in that sense it’s a bit like giving a BMW M3 to someone who’s just passed their test. The horsepower arrives long before the skill that stops you putting in a hedge.

This is why the creative and consultancy industries feel brittle. So many people want the polished thought without the unglamorous labour that gives it heft. They want the sketch without the sketching. The judgement without the years that make judgement possible. And Ai, obliging thing that it is, makes that performance look convincing enough to fool the untrained eye, and sometimes even the trained one.

None of this makes the technology good or bad. It just makes it pretty shouty. And once a tool starts talking back, the responsibility shifts to the person holding it. Which is really just to say: the work doesn’t get better because the software is clever. It gets better because someone in the room still knows what good feels like.

AI: This piece was assisted with Ai. I used it for the tags, excerpt, the image generation and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were, however all mine.

  1. If you want the long version of why the question “Is Ai creative?” is a trap, Lisa Talia Moretti does a tidy job of dismantling it. She walks through the mess of competing definitions, points out the extent of human labour and data sit behind every so-called “creative” output, and ends up arguing that generative Ai is better understood as a medium than a tool. ↩︎
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nov 06 2025
socio-cultural, work

Ghosts in the Picture Book

The other day, I was reading a children’s book with our daughter when I saw it: a corded telephone. Black, wall-mounted, with a dangling spiral wire. The sort of phone that last rang in anger sometime around the Blair years.

Roger Hargreaves's; Little Miss Neat picks up vintage style corded black telephone.
The Telephone rang. Little Miss Neat picked it up.

A few mornings later, it happened again, Baby Club on the BBC, all primary colours and soft clapping, and there, on the play mat , was a car. Not one she’d ever recognise. A boxy saloon. Straight-edged. Round headlights. The kind of thing you’d find idling outside a golf club in 1987.

What’s odd isn’t that these images exist, they’re charming, even lovingly drawn. It’s that they still feel like the default. Most phones today are glass bricks. Most cars look like they’ve been inflated rather than put together in a factory.

But when we illustrate for children, we reach back, not to what they know, but to what we remember. This isn’t a developmental crisis. Children don’t need realism to read meaning.

Jean Mandler’s research (thank you ‘Ai research team’) showed they use schematic categories, “car,” “dog,” “phone”, not photoreal recall.

Furthermore, Ellen Winner proved they can grasp symbolism early on (i.e. hey don’t need realism to understand things). So, no one’s confused. That’s not the point. The point is that these images persist, long after their referents have disappeared. The floppy disk still means save. A film reel still means video. A telephone still curls like a question mark.

We say it’s just design shorthand, but it isn’t. It’s something stickier.

These are the ghosts of our interfaces, icons of touchpoints no child will ever touch.

Gunther Kress‘ observations describe how meaning doesn’t update on command. It drags history behind it and changing the meaning of symbols requires overcoming an awful lot of cultural inertia. And children’s media, shaped entirely by adults, ends up as a kind of curated hauntology: a world that looks nothing like theirs, but everything like ours did, right around the time we were their age.

They swipe past rotary phones, expect Santa to come down a chimney no longer connected to a fireplace, draw little square cars with four doors and no raised suspension. It’s sentimental and not remotely sinister but it does mean they grow up consuming artefacts of use they’ll never need.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s like castles in fairy tales. But it’s hard not to feel the ache of it, that their books are filled with our objects, our past, our cultural residue.

Perhaps more concerningly, they’re not learning to navigate the world as it is. They’re learning to decode the leftovers of how we once did.

So I find myself wondering now what a picture book drawn from today would look like. Would the car even be recognisable? Would anyone bother sketching a glass rectangle phone? Or would the page just show a toddler, alone, swiping at the air, waiting for something to respond.

AI: This piece used AI to help me research the psychology references and summarise their observations. I used it for the tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and anecdotes were all mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nov 04 2025
socio-cultural, work

The Week Away That Never Quite Happens

Every few weeks at this time of year, my thumb betrays me. It hovers over a post of a cabin somewhere on the edge of a loch or moor, all shō sugi ban cladding, light oak, mid-century desks and ‘vintage’ lightbulbs, and presses like. The algorithm now thinks I’m the sort of man who wears wool socks and writes preposterously neatly in propelling pencil beside a woodburner. It’s not entirely wrong.

There’s something magnetic about those images: the design-led minimalism that’s somehow still warm; the promise of solitude that doesn’t look lonely. I imagine a week in one of them — laptop off, phone on airplane, words finally unspooling in peace. I can practically smell the Danish oil.

A lone Scandinavian-looking cabin from 57 Nord contemplates its life choices above a Scottish loch, surrounded by smugly photogenic hills pretending it’s always this sunny.
The luxury of slow living at 57 Nord: 57nord.co.uk .. a cabin I adore, can’t afford and will never book

This time of year encourages such delusions. There’s just enough light in the mornings to feel alive, but enough dusk to make retreat seem reasonable. You could slip away for a week and no one would really notice. The trees are almost bare, the pubs half-empty, and the countryside looks half-finished, as if waiting for someone to turn up with a notebook.

In my head, I’m dictating into my phone while trudging through leaf-sodden lanes or across a windswept upland. Evenings mean simple food, one-pot stews, bread, the sort of red wine you can chew, and perhaps the odd night at a pub, purely for proof of humanity. I’d come back leaner, calmer, possibly holding the first chapter of The Book*.

Except I never go. Yes, a little because of fear or money (and the logistics of family life) but mostly because the fantasy works too well.. The idea of the week away does its job before it begins: it restores a sense of possible order. Just imagining the solitude feels productive, which is as close to it as most of us ever get.

What makes us crave it? Age, maybe – the mid-life suspicion that our attention’s been pawned off to apps and admin. Or perhaps it’s just winter and that soft command to draw inwards, to tidy one’s psyche before spring. Either way, the idea of leaving it all behind has become one more thing to scroll through, admire … and postpone.

I like to think it’s not laziness but calibration by which I mean a quiet audit of what would actually change if I went. Would I write more? Probably not. Would I look less at my phone? For a day, perhaps two. Mostly, I’d just be somewhere else doing the same gentle dance of distraction, albeit with better lighting and a view.

Still, the fantasy has its use. It reminds me there’s another tempo available, one I could, in theory, choose. And maybe that’s enough for now. Some people meditate. I browse cabins I’ll never book. We each find our way back to silence, even if it’s only through the screen.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine and were composed in Surrey, not Scotland.

* this is my first public announcement that I do have a (non fiction) book in mind. It may also be the only time I ever mention it.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nov 02 2025
work

Time Returned, Time Resold

Rain-blurred motorway at dusk viewed through a windscreen; dashboard lights glow amber in an empty driver’s seat — a quiet image of autonomy and time unclaimed.
Autonomy promised freedom. Instead, it gave us metrics.

Every few years a new invention turns up promising to give us time back. The dishwasher did it, then the calendar app, now the self-driving car. Efficiency, they say, is liberation. But the minutes never come home. They’re quietly re-employed: answering messages that weren’t urgent until we saw them, scrolling through news we already half-read. We don’t get more time. It just comes back wearing a different outfit.

Design now speaks the intoxicating language of generosity. We’ll save you clicks. We’ll make it seamless. Lovely words, but they come with a tempo you didn’t choose. The system nudges, reminds, congratulates you on your streak. Even the oven chirps when it’s done pre-heating. Helpful, yes – in the way a personal trainer is helpful when all you wanted was a walk.

Efficiency was meant to hush the world, not make it chatter. Parcels update you mid-journey, cars suggest faster routes, TV apps interrupt the credits to make sure you don’t go off to bed just yet. You start to feel managed by your own apps and appliances. Is it me, or do they all sound slightly pleased with themselves?

Still, there is a deeper promise in all this autonomy. Because the best thing about a self-driving car isn’t speed, it’s permission. The choice to drive when you want to: for rhythm, for presence, for drivers like me who relish the satisfaction of line and camber, and to switch off when you don’t. The long crawl north to the Lakes. The dawn blast to the airport. The late-night, rain-spray-soaked slog home when you’d gladly hand over the wheel and let the motorway unspool while you exhale, watch the window-light flicker, maybe half-doze through an episode of something forgettable. Control should be optional, not constant.

That’s what the technology could be about: selective surrender or a quieter freedom. But for some unfathomable reason, the marketing and product design departments have decided autonomy is best packaged as constant optimisation. That means another dashboard app full of metrics and prompts and juanty reminders. We built cars clever enough to drive themselves, then gave them personalities that never stop talking.

Real luxury now isn’t speed but discretion: the right to decide how long something should take. To drive when you feel like driving. To look out of the window when you don’t. Technology can make both possible.

Convenience promised to return our hours, but mostly it’s taught us to account for them. Every minute feels spoken for. Perhaps the odd thing is how willingly we’ve agreed to it and the peculiar pleasure we take in shaving seconds off tasks we didn’t enjoy anyway.

Maybe the best thing a self-driving car could do is forget the ETA and let us forget, too.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Oct 09 2025
work

Predictive Luxury: When the Algorithm Decides You’re Worth It

The paradox of modern luxury is that the more precisely it knows us, the less we seem to want it.
AI-driven personalisation flatters our taste so efficiently that desire itself begins to flatten. You open an app and there it is – the jacket you’d half-imagined, or the playlist that mirrors your mood before you’ve named it. The system anticipates, arranges, and completes. It feels frictionless, even generous.

But when everything fits this neatly, what’s left to reach for? Desire once depended on a perceptible gap, the space between wanting and getting. Now that gap has been optimised away. We no longer aspire; we’re simply anticipated.

Behind that easy charm sits a machinery, an industry, of prediction. Every scroll, hover, and hesitation becomes a confession. From these micro-gestures, the algorithm builds a probabilistic portrait: accurate enough to sell to, not to know.

This is predictive luxury – the luxury of convenience. It packages aspiration for the mass-affluent, translating status into data. The product is still expensive, but the experience is engineered for scale: “exclusive” taste delivered by statistical consensus. What once required discernment now arrives pre-approved.

To be clear, this isn’t curation. It’s correlation. Your discernment becomes the weighted average of everyone who clicked before you. Luxury houses once guarded their ateliers; now they guard their datasets. What was once stitched by hand is now inferred by pattern.

The shift sounds harmless until you notice what it removes.
Aspiration (the slow, self-defining kind) relies on uncertainty. We learned our taste through trial, boredom, and even embarrassment. Those edges are gone. There’s no risk in going to the restaurant where the algorithm has all but booked you the table. The algorithm keeps our preferences in a holding pattern, replaying what we’ve already confirmed, always within one standard deviation of safety.

The Predictive Plateau: a system that sells us the most probable choice, not the most interesting one. Left unchecked, it narrows the collective palate. As I argued in Luxury UX: Beyond Veneer, lasting equity comes from structure and restraint, not surface gloss. The real risk for luxury brands isn’t technological obsolescence but aesthetic homogeneity, a market trained to prefer the median.

Prediction is never neutral. Behind every act of personalisation sits a hierarchy of visibility, whom the machine believes is worth showing first. The more data you surrender, the clearer your silhouette in its model; those who resist become statistical ghosts.

There’s a quiet economics to this. By automating inequality, the algorithm devalues any form of wealth it cannot quantify or identify. The ultimate luxury, then, is to disappear from the data entirely, to operate through introductions, word of mouth, and private networks. The truly exclusive product is the one the algorithm cannot find, let alone recommend.

And yet there’s still one lever left: intentionality. The deliberate pause before purchase. The refusal to click “similar items”. The act of finding something the algorithm couldn’t possibly have foreseen. In a world of predictive luxury, this is not passive rebellion but an active aesthetic stance, a luxury of choice by will.

The smartest brands will design for this intentionality, not against it. They’ll reintroduce or retain friction as a feature: the waitlist, the mandatory consultation, the garment that demands to be felt. These are not inefficiencies but signals of depth, proof that the experience values attention over automation.

For all its precision, predictive luxury leaves a vacuum at the top. Once algorithms have colonised the middle (the mass-affluent market chasing “smart” recommendations), genuine exclusivity must move elsewhere. Increasingly, it drifts back to what machines can’t do: interpretation, eccentricity, the unrepeatable judgement of people who know.

That’s where true luxury now lives, in human-centred unpredictability. The ultra-wealthy and the culturally literate aren’t rejecting technology; they’re augmenting it. Data may light the runway, but the finale still belongs to the artisan, the editor, the quietly idiosyncratic expert who can surprise you in ways no model can.

Close-up of a tailor’s worktable lit by soft natural light, showing thread spools, scissors, and a half-finished jacket with a visible imperfect seam — an image symbolising human craftsmanship and intentional imperfection in contrast to algorithmic precision.

British luxury has long understood this. Our best exports – Savile Row, Bentley Mulliner, McQueen, Hockney, Grayson Perry – thrive on that narrow line between discipline and disobedience. Their genius isn’t efficiency but editing: knowing when to break symmetry, when to leave the imperfect seam that proves a hand was there. The imperfect seam is a brand’s deliberate investment in unscalable production – the final, physical proof of value when all scalable processes have been commoditised. Curation, as I’ve argued before, isn’t collection. It’s the art of choosing what not to automate.

The challenge for brands now is to build value not through correlation but through judgement. To shift from efficiency to experience, from prediction to anti-prediction. Their next digital frontier isn’t better personalisation; it’s deliberate unpredictability, the algorithm that refuses to close the loop. Designing such friction isn’t romantic contrarianism; it’s the only sustainable strategy for generating new forms of scarcity, and with them, price elasticity.

Because in an economy obsessed with knowing what comes next, the rarest thing a brand can offer is the pleasure of not knowing, of being surprised, seen, and momentarily off-script. That’s the new exclusivity. That’s predictive luxury, undone.

Acknowledgements: This piece was partly inspired by Antonia Hock’s recent post on invisibility and the next era of ultra-luxury.

AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine. You can still see my hand.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Oct 02 2025
work

The Loyalty Programme That Forgot How Parenthood Works

A parent stands by the open rear door of a family car on a rainy day, checking their phone which shows a zero loyalty points balance, while two Cybex child car seats are visible in the back on with a sleeping toddler in it.
Ten years, three seats, still loyal. The app says otherwise.

I’ve been through the Cybex catalogue more than once. Our son (2014) graduated seat by seat. Our daughter (2023) reset the cycle. That’s two children, multiple seats, a base, plus the odd accessory. All dutifully registered with Cybex’s Club, a loyalty scheme that promises free shipping, birthday treats, “exclusive offers” , y’know, the usual garnish.

This isn’t a flex. Cybex is high-end stuff, and we bought it because I lost a friend and his son in a dreadful car accident years ago and I became obsessed with buying the very best. That said …

Here’s how loyalty actually played out:

  • Jul-Sep 2023 — I registered three products: Cloud T (baby seat), Base T (for same), Sol Z-fix (Child’s booster). About 136 points earned.
  • Nov 2023 — a 100-point “bonus” dropped.
  • Summer–Autumn 2024 — the slow bleed: –45, –86, –5, –100. By the end of the year, the balance was gone. I saw the expiry warnings, but they were irrelevant – I didn’t need new products at that point.
  • Sep 2025 — I came back for our daughter’s next seat, the Sirona. Logged in before checkout: 0 points. Of course, after paying the account lit up with +150 “bonus”.

So the scheme doesn’t reward loyalty at all (beyond ‘free postage’). It rewards the purchase you’ve just made. A pat on the back after you’ve handed over your card.

I think you see where I’m going though, the deeper flaw is structural. Car seats don’t follow marketing calendars; they follow biology. Parents buy in long arcs: infant to toddler, toddler to child, every two to four years. A one-year expiry is a guaranteed wipeout. The cadence of childhood doesn’t match the cadence of a CRM dashboard.

What would a loyalty scheme look like if it took parenthood seriously?

  • Milestones – reward the upgrade points: newborn → toddler → child → booster.
  • Moments – top-ups on birthdays or product anniversaries, nudges to check fittings and sizes/weights, effectively MOT-style safety checks.
  • Upgrade triggers – automatic credits seeded ahead of the next seat, not after it.
  • Accessories and cover — redeemable on spare covers, pads, travel bags. Or fold them into warranty extensions — the things parents actually use between major purchases.
  • Recycling – the chronic gap. Car seats can’t be resold, gifting feels reckless, and regulations block obvious reuse. A scheme could collect and recycle them responsibly, with credits back for doing the right thing.
  • Family pooling — roll credits across siblings so value doesn’t die with one child’s cycle.

None of that is radical. It just respects the rhythm of a family’s life.

Instead, the experience feels like bait and switch: promises on the front page, expiry in the small print. Which is clever if the goal is data capture, catastrophic if the goal is trust.

Of course, I still bought the Sirona. Safety and product quality trump irritation. But the goodwill is thinner now. The wider lesson is simple: if your model ignores the customer’s real timeline, you’re not building loyalty. You’re designing disappointment.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
Sep 25 2025
work

Luxury UX beyond veneer: structure as brand equity

Split illustration in muted tones: on the left, a sleek SUV fades into static on a computer configurator screen; on the right, a calm hotel lobby with warm wood panelling, guests moving easily, and luggage arriving without fuss. The contrast shows polish versus structure, with luxury defined by order and rhythm rather than surface gloss.
Luxury isn’t in the chrome or the marble, it’s in whether the flow holds together without a fuss.

Luxury brands spend fortunes on surface. The right serif typeface. The right depth of cream on a website background. The right stock gsm on the brochure. Product renders with depth of field and lighting artefacts. But luxury UX cannot stop at veneer. If the underlying structure is clumsy, if journeys collapse into confusion or friction, then no amount of polish will hold that illusion.

The truth is that structure itself carries brand equity. The way a digital product is architected, how steps are ordered, how rules are introduced, how decisions are simplified, does more to signal competence and care than a thousand pixels of perfected pack shots. At Jaguar Land Rover we learned that millions of pounds of glossy configurator rendering and photoshoots is wasted if the journey collapses under its own contradictions.

When veneer is not enough

Consider that car configurator (I know I’ve been there before). The surface details may be flawless: chrome toggles, cinematic photography and transitions, elegant typography. Yet if the underlying structure forces a prospective customer through contradictory options, backtracking, or endless reloads, the brand is weakened. The luxury dissolves. Instead of modernity, the prospect experiences muddle. Instead of trust, they feel doubt.

Luxury is clarity disguised as ease. It is the sense that someone has already edited the path, made the trade-offs, and left you with decisions that feel not just coherent but inevitable. That coherence is structural. It is information architecture, not simple brand varnish.

Structure as invisible luxury

In regulated sectors, be it finance, healthcare, mobility, the stakes are higher still. Here, the user must feel that the product knows where it is going. A well-structured flow reassures not only through compliance but through a designed rhythm: disclosure followed by choice, choice followed by confirmation. In finance, disclosure sequencing is as much brand equity as trust marks in the footer. At Aviva, I saw how form ordering and timing mattered more than any banner, ad or brand flourish: get it wrong and trust collapses, get it right and the entire flow feels humane.

    This isn’t just true for luxury. At parkrun, where we were engaged to think about participant and volunteer profiles, the brand moment wasn’t surface polish but whether participants could find a barcode or book a roster slot without friction. There are quieter sectors away from money and luxe, but the principle holds: structure carries the brand.

    Hospitality and the British lens

    Top-end hospitality has always understood that structure outlasts surface. A hotel lobby isn’t luxury because of materials and furnishings alone; it’s luxury because check-in is peaceful, calming, effortless, because luggage appears without fuss, because the guest never feels unwillingly abandoned. The choreography, the sequencing of service, is the brand. Digital is no different. Done well, it is hospitality by other means.

    And here, for me, Britishness adds something. Where continental, EMEA or American luxury can lean toward performance, grand gestures, overt pampering, British luxury often communicates through understatement. Polished restraint. A dry nod over a champagne cascade and a platter of Dubai chocolate. That sensibility, translated into UX, means editing with discipline: fewer options, quieter confirmations, a flow that carries the user forward without ever drawing attention to itself. Not austere, not joyless. Just less show, more order.

    Brand equity in restraint

    A luxury brand earns equity not just through what it offers, but through what it withholds. The best experiences show judgement in what not to display, what not to demand, where to pause. Luxury isn’t ensured by the liberal application of gloss. Sheen can be appropriated, copied, imitated overnight. What endures is structure: the edits, the sequencing, the courage to strip things back until only what matters remains.

    When the experience lands with this quiet integrity, the user may never notice the scaffolding beneath. But they will feel the brand in the unbroken rhythm of moving forward without friction. That is luxury UX beyond veneer, luxury as restraint, stewardship, clarity. A quiet moral order and the calm assurance that polish and structure belong together if the experience is to endure.

    AI: This piece was written by me. I used ChatGPT as a sub-editor to keep tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpt and image that accompanies it.

    Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    ← Older posts
    Newer posts →