On time, before you read the years

Every chart below has years on it, and the years are the least interesting thing about them. Twenty years is not twenty units of anything. Time is not volume, it is sense—what a stretch of it was for, what it changed, and what it left behind. Some of the shortest bands here did the most work.

So read the proportions rather than the length. I wrote about this for the Long Now Foundation: Native time, for the Book of Time Lab →

Methods

Nothing here replaced what came before. Consulting has run since 2008 and is still the main practice; teaching came in 2020 and sits alongside it. The layers accumulate rather than take turns.

Experiments

My experiments in curation, and being interviewed, taught me a great deal—along with a lot of discussions with industry leaders and experts.

Projects

Made Content Hug, ran my international conference, hosted international guests in a Medium series, and teach UX, content design, and products at a university in Austria.

Life elsewhere

Personal explorations: walking experiences, letters to my son, a career design service for students, and a long influence from The Fifth Discipline.

The lens

The gains accumulated and integrated to shape the systems, synthesising all those learnings and perspectives into product thinking.

Standards

I always believe in defining certain standards of how we work and why we work in a given situation. I have often admired Stripe for their standards—it just shows in their product and in their positioning. They may not be perfect and you might have your own experiences, but every interaction I have had shows attention and care in the work.

The references and the people behind those standards—Stripe's search UX, the practitioners, the publications, the communities—live on their own page now, with a line each on what they changed for me. See Influence →

This page is inspired by Bret Victor.