The internet has unleashed a world of total change; a time of miraculous achievements and wonders, but also turbulence, confusion and discord. The story of my career over the past 23+ is in many ways years has been trying to find a place within this shape-shifting environment.

Over the decades I’ve designed and developed front-end frameworks, hand-coded intranets, and led international research projects. I’ve mapped journeys, crafted futuristic visions, and shaped tools and strategies. I’ve talked to hundreds of people frustrated and perplexed at the experiences we’ve tried to create.

Being an experience consultant offers us an almost holographic view on society, letting us see how technological change has impacted different people and industries across every strata of society. The amplifying complexities offer a constant flow of new challenges that requires experience to navigate, but also the courage to adapt, step into the unknown and explore new ways of approaching and solving problems. Technology enables marvels, but it can easily become dehumanising when people and societies are reduced to cells on a spreadsheet. Elevating the voice of the user to senior decisions makers is key in breaking through the unreality of data and dashboards.

Who I've Worked With 

Attitude & Approach

  • The world is fast-moving and messy, and at the outset of projects, before deep-dive discovery has begun, we often find ourselves making consequential decisions in low-information situations. Meticulous over-planning at an early stage is unwise, as teams can become locked into trajectories that reveal themselves unsuitable to the still-evolving problem space. Artifacts such as service blueprints, personas or even prototypes should not be sold as deliverables, but one of many tools to help us solve business and user problems or provide insight. So long as we hit hard deadlines, provide value and stay within budgets, our approach should be fluid and adaptable.

  • I like to work with key stakeholders as if we are on the same team, with full transparency on what we are doing and what to expect. We should not behave as if there is a spin doctor between us rewording our every interaction. Larger clients, especially when they have worked with many other suppliers in the past, have heard it all before. If we are encountering difficulties or they need to be flagged early on, so we can change direction and get a good outcome. There are few grand reveals - unless it is to wider stakeholder groups - and lots of pacing up and down our war rooms bouncing about ideas. If nothing else, it is also a great bonding experience, and always leads to more insightful findings, satisfactory design outcomes and longer and more robust client relationships.

  • As somebody of creative persuasion, I think big ideas and dreaming are profoundly important to design and innovation. That said, hard evidence is also crucial to ground ideas in what people really want and to stop clients from squandering money on harebrained ideas. We should be cautious of railroading big ideas into full production without some form of research informing the strategy. Wherever possible, qual and quant should be woven together in a single story to support the design strategy. If nothing else, it can contribute to a business case that can win over hardball stakeholders.

  • Design is, in the scheme of things, a simple problem to solve. Much more vexing are tackling a legacy technical issue that lies with another team, poor communications between departments, or maverick stakeholders with a single-minded vision for a feature that nobody wants. Such systemic issues can be frustrating as they fall outside the remit you’ve been tasked to investigate and may be rooted in long-established corporate culture. Nevertheless, it is important to identify and map these problems even if a solution is beyond the scope of the immediate project. From an outside perspective these problems may be self-evident, but to those within the organisation, showing the connected nature of issues can be illuminating and become an opportunity to elevate the company’s UX maturity.

  • The nature of communication is changing. The organisational impulse to share weighty report documents crammed with data is not in line with how people are consuming and sharing media and can have little tangible impact on the broader orgaisation due to this comprehension bottleneck. (Indeed, the dense diagrams and impenetrable PowerPoints of the US State departments may have contributed to them losing the Afghan war.) This is why I am committed to communicating ideas and insights using whatever medium is most appropriate. For several years, I’ve experimented with increased usage of video as a way to deliver findings, amping up video highlights to something more akin to short documentaries. I also want to ensure the voice of the end user is heard by the senior stakeholders or C-level execs. I’ve also worked with clients such as Tesco, Starbucks and Visa to create explainer videos to share insights or product visions throughout the wider business.

Software Skills as of 2023

Here are handful of case studies from over the years. Of course, much of my more recent work is NDA’d and it isn’t possible to share publicly. I can however mention that I’ve most recently helped research and design the new Starbucks Digital Experience, worked on multiple research projects for Visa, led a discovery and design project for prestigious hotel giant Aman Resorts and estate agency Savills, and helped explore and launch a new digital proposition with VetPartners.

Understanding Media Today (2024)

A talk celebrating sixty years of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work “Understanding Media”, which changed how we think about the nature communication. His aphorisms and probes — the most famous being “the medium is the message” and “the global village” — have sunk into the collective unconscious, yet for many today he is a distant figure, even in the field of media ecology.

For a time McLuhan was spoken of alongside Newton, Einstein and Freud. A man of paradox, he was a conservative Catholic who became a counterculture icon; a historian exalted as a futurist. By the late 1970s, however, McLuhan was a forgotten figure, dismissed as unserious, a borderline crank. Yet the decades since his death have proven that his key insight and instincts were far more profound that perhaps even he realised.

This two-hour talk with Long Now London I took the audience on a journey through the origins, development and implications of McLuhan’s worldview, and talked about how his ideas and outlook are as fresh today as they were six decades ago.

Becoming a UX Centaur (2023)

In July 2023 I spoke at UX Crunch alongside Mujtaba Hameed and Olena Bulygina about the intersection of UX and AI. A common theme between us was that generating "users" is folly, but that new generations of AI tools may lead to novel ways of synthesising information, speeding up workflows, and extending and augmenting our current capabilities as researchers and designers. For instance, I've found Midjourney an extraordinary tool to help tell the stories of users and make research findings more accessible. I’ve always considered the value of good UX is to provide a pipeline of real human voices to the often inhuman world of dashboards and numbers that is the boardroom. One danger is that sometimes costly qualitative research comes to be seen as something that can be replaced by authentic-sounding- but phantasmic portrayals of customers and user needs conjured by AI, whose validity is justified through the motivated reasoning of needing to tighten the budget.

The Deep Time of Technē (2022)

In May 2022, at Salon Noire in Black’s Club, I gave my first public attempt* at articulating my thoughts on the relationship between art, technology, and the human condition and how it impacts the modern world and our day-to-day lives. Covering the shifting nature of media in its major phases, beginning in the stone age, it told the story of how humans tell stories, how we derive meaning, and how things went so terribly wrong. You can watch a brief quote clip made for the event - Apollo & Dionysus - here, voiced by Kirsten Gord.

*Outside of boring my colleagues at the bar

Jamie monologuing over a slide about the shift from orality, to mass literacy, to post-literacy.

The XD Hackathon (2022)

In early 2022, I wrote, designed and organised four hourly training sessions for Inviqa’s XD team about the origins and function of storytelling, models on how to structure them, how to write scripts, and how to record, film and edit video. The series culminated in the XD Hackathon, hosted by myself. Following it, as hoped, our team started to produce more video content more often, in a variety of interesting contexts. We are living through the twilight of mass literacy, and burdening clients with weighty research reports is no way to impact a business.

The XD Hackathon title screen

Why Deep Work (2021)

Delivered remotely for the 2021 BAD (Behaviour and Design) conference in 2021, this presentation was advocacy for the value of Deep Work and how to create optimal conditions for people, and teams, achieving '“Flow States”. Flow states are essential to both human flourishing and to productivity, but are often at odds with how technology projects are scoped and sold. You can see the full deck here.

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WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS (2015)

This talk, first given at Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University London, was a humorous look at the neurological and cultural basis of the at the fault line between the different worldview and cognitive styles of developers and designers. 

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: THE FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS (2015)

This talk - initially created for a "lunch and learn" - looks at the use of technology to communicate information throughout humanity's history, and how it has altered the course of our evolution.  

UK DIGITal STRATEGY Consultation (2016) 

I contributed to a 2016 Digital Consultation document to share ideas about the UK’s future digital strategy, along with other members of Newspeak House. This was authored in response to UK Government Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey’s call for public and industry to share their ideas on how to fuel the UK’s digital revolution. My contribution in large part focussed on digital literacy including the need for critical thinking and ways to assess if something is “true” be taught alongside other fundamental skills.  

Read more the full document or the section on digital literacy.

Floodhack (2014) 

In 2014 I attended #Floodhack; a response by the tech community to develop new technologies to help respond to flash flooding in order to minimise damage and save lives. Our concept - working title MyState - was a low-tech (feature phone and up) means for emergency services to gain an information-rich map of affected areas and receive warnings for their location should conditions escalate. The system was judged by Google, Tech City, No. 10, and the Cabinet Office, and our concept was incorporated into the UK’s future flood response strategy. Learn more about Floodhack here. 

Hack The Workplace (2014) 

Have the Workplace was a two-day workshop to develop ways of improving the workplace through new practices and technologies. We developed an online service to create "weak ties" between different parts of companies to facilitate the spread of ideas, nurture friendships and limit the spread of cliques and patrimonialism that can damage corporate culture . At the end of the weekend, to some embarrassment, I was presented an award for the “hardest worker”.

Startup Weekend (2012)

On the weekend on March 2nd 2012 I took part in Startup Weekend, hosted at Google’s Head Office in Dublin. While my own project pitch, for Deep Time, failed to get the adequate amount of backing, I joined the AppAce Team to help Stephen McManus achieve his vision of creating a classrooom based game for teaching students entrepreneurial skills.  Along with Hrishikesh Ballal, I developed the gameplay mechanics, graphics and the above video, which I presented at the end of the weekend. AppAce has now evolved into the startup RipTide Academy. You can view our presentation reel here.  

 

These enjoyable thought experiments explore interesting ideas and projects that could be plausibly achieved with present day or near-future technologies. Here are a few.

 

Future You (2014)

Future you began with the twin quandaries of how to encourage people to save for retirement, and the inability to make accurate projections of future savings due to both compliance issues and inherent problems with the accuracy of long term predictions themselves. A primary challenge, backed by a not insignificant amount of research, is that people find difficulty in imagining themselves in the future, but artificially aged photos of themselves could alter that perception. Thus I came up with the idea of a big-data powered "Dorian Gray" style portrait of you - a photorealistic 3D model of you that has been aged and would sit on your table, or hang on your wall, and visually reflect what you would look like in the future based on your current behaviours and habits. Saving habits were a primary variable of course, as are location, diet and exercise linked via various wearable devices. Global trends would also feed into the algorithm.

Your environment in the portrait, such as whether you're sitting in a hovel or sitting on a cruise ship, your appearance, such as the clothes you're wearing and the complexion of your face, would all change day to day based on such factors, sometimes incredibly subtley - a few more liver spots here and there - sometimes dramatically. It would also have built in functions to allow you to send money to your future self there and then. 

Compositionally it would resemble the structure of classic paintings and portraits, fed as it is by big-data and constructed by artificial intelligence based on these rules. Aesthetically, the image would flicker, glitch and fade, as if a dream, to communicate the great temporal distance between you and your future self. In 2015, I created a basic prototype in Final Cut Pro and Keynote using photos of my father. 

TimeScope (2017)

Timescope was conceived of as a way to increase footfall and revenue for English Heritage. A great number of their properties in their estate are little more than rubble and of interest only to hardcore history aficionados. Timescope was conceived of as a pastiche of the iconic coin-operated binocular, but instead of viewing across space it viewed dioramas from past times of that precise location. Essentially it would be an on-site VR experience that would map scenes from that location to episodes from its past; a Roman villa in its past glory days, a medieval battle scene or village, a pagan ritual around stone circles, and so on. It would accept contactless payments as well as legacy payments of coins, as well as be integrated with an NFC enabled members card and integrated with the rest of the content and experience ecosystem. The user interface and audio branding wold be consistent with web, app and audio guide ecosystem. Content could be remotely updated, and the front cover could be removed by technicians for hardware upgrades as the technology improves. 

Deep Time v.1.0 (2011)

Deep Time v1. was an ambitious plan to build an app that was to evolutionary history what Google Earth is to geography. Sketched at first around 2011 as a hypothetical "sci-fi" tool to navigate evolutionary history, friends in the startup community convinced me to try and bring it to life as an iPad app. 

The goal was to build the definitive tool for organising, managing and interfacing with information about the remote past and the biological world; as a means for the lay audience to comprehend the theory of evolution, and a tool for the broader scientific community to manage this vast wealth of data behind it. The ultimate goal was to catalogue all life that exists, or has ever existed, and present it to a lay audience in a way that is easy to understand and instantly comprehensible. It got so far as discussions with ex-microsoft developers around taxonomies of the phylogenetic trees and early talks with researchers at University College Dublin. 

Deep Time v2.0 (2017) 

After spending some time exploring the various VR experience on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it struck me that this may actually be the ideal medium to communicate the immensity of geological time and the epic grandeur of biological evolution. VR can give people a sense of presence unlike any other medium. When the true depth of geological time was first learned by intellectuals in the 19th century, it caused an kind of existential vertigo, however today "dinosaurs" have just become just another pop culture trope, like pokemon or horror movie icons and the deeper questions these beasts posed about our place in the cosmos has been forgotten.

Stylistically, it must be a million miles from photogenic millennials walking in slow-mo to jangly guitar music next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead, the music, ambiance and narration would take on a much more cinematic character. Each era (i.e. The Hadean, the Carboniferous) could come with its own musical score, from ambient background music to the soundtrack, in a similar manner to Holst's "The Planets". This more gamified version would see the user gradually unlock geological epochs and be encouraged to explore a set number of "arenas" where they would be compelled to look for new life-forms and see where they fit in the overall evolution of life. By the time the user gets to our own era, they will have a much deeper understanding of human activities given this new eon-long contextualisation. 

Apple Monocle (2015)

Also called “Looking Glass” this project developed from a conversation with my old friend, Alex Macdonald on the future of augmented reality technologies. I thought it would be nice to sketch out and design what it may look like.

Traversal Suit (2015)

My friend and colleague Klaus Bravenboer was pondering the idea “Could you build something like a stillsuit from the book Dune using today’s technology to help people in hostile environments today?” After a chat, and him showing his initial sketches, I decided to explore the ideas in some more depth, with a particular focus on the combination of VR, AR and drones technologies working in unison to extend and protect the user’s consciousness beyond the constraints of the body. There was also a particular focus on “probe” drones to map 3D spaces to explore in VR before physical movement, and a “crown” drone launched from the head, to become the user’s eyes and hands in inaccessible places. 

 

Sketchbook of both Client and personal projects 

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