Some thoughts on hiring, quality & public service
What people often misunderstand about hiring in public service is the sheer quality and commitment of those who choose to work in government,
Notes on Modernization and System Change
Look, we need to talk about what happens when we let “making things more efficient” become the only way we judge system changes. Because right now,
Why would you take a promotion without a raise?
Sometimes fixing what’s broken matters more Public service is a weird gambit. The trade for some is getting stability in exchange for less money
Service Design for AI: Why Human Experience (HX) Matters
As AI reshapes how we interact with systems and each other, we need to expand our understanding of what’s at stake. I’ve spent years talking &
On adapting my coaching philosophy
Coaching interviews at the high school and small college level, mostly relate to your philosophy. At a certain point, folks want to know what you’ve
Writing about personal stuff
Blogging used to be a lot of fun before we let robots data mine everybody & sell it unfettered. As a result, there’s less incentive to get deep
On Goals & Invisible Lines
There’s something fascinating about the concept of breaking the plane in football. This invisible vertical barrier that extends infinitely upward
On Secret Hobbies (or About My First Talk of 2025)
I joined AI Portland on Thursday night for an event at Kiln, where seven presenters—including yours truly—talked about how they use AI tools to
On Resolutions
I’ve never been big on resolutions. Every year is different. You’re making guesses about where things might go, what will happen, and who you’ll
From Tools to Territory: How Systems Become Infrastructure
I first noticed it during a web redesign project. The client kept referring to their content management system as “just how we work.” Not a tool
On Lasting Resilience
The fleeting existence of government digital services teams in the United States should have always been understood as something like a comet
Scoring Baseball’s Golden At-Bat: Why Finland’s Pesäpallo Already Has a Better Solution
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred recently floated the idea of a “Golden At-Bat” rule that would allow teams one opportunity per game to send any batter
Dismantling Things Takes Time
I’ve been deep in historical texts lately, particularly focused on the early 20th century - an unusual departure from my typical reading habits.
What I’ve learned about posting in a post-Twitter world
If you haven’t heard, we’re so back. Bluesky is bringing people in faster than the fast lanes at Disney. I’ve had to take a step back the past
Rushing into the elevator to avoid saying hello
(or more reflections on life in Portland)) I’ve met a lot of nice people here in the past 6 years. Not just people i’ve been in relationships with,
Wrote about that one time I was a game designer
I don’t talk about inventing a sport much these days, but I did a short retrospective — as a chance to reboot my newsletter — on Toccer/Tennis on
On AI and Care
I’ve been thinking about the small things that happen within the margins of interpersonal interactions, specifically those that occur in a service
On House Rules
I grew up playing card games, specifically Spades. As the oldest grandchild and the first kid of my generation, I often had the good fortune—thanks
Robbed of thoughts
The proliferation of AI makes me think a lot about how many longtime internet denizen come of age online. We started with crude tools that were
Civil Futures and the speculative present
Beyond the obvious negative connotations of futurists, I’ve long been drawn to realities that imagine me in their ideas. One of the inherent
Using a AAAA major league + winter major league to develop fringe prospects
I haven’t blogged about Out of the Park baseball in a long time, but I figure relying on forums and other places for information sharing when I just
Why the pricing out of youth sports so personal
The NYTimes opinion story today on youth sports being a multi-billion dollar industry that prices out poor, urban & rural kids is indeed a personal
8 Arenas of Action Matrix
Complicated: For situations that require expertise, bring in knowledgeable people to create detailed plans and make sure everyone can follow them.
Assessing the worthiness of posting in the AI era
Social media being disconnected thanks to the demise of Twitter remains something I think about a lot. I’m also wondering about the value of
On social media platforms & separation of concerns
Twitter’s demise has brought a variety of imposters aiming to give users a semblance of what we had for years. Twitter’s magic had less to do with
Why we ought to be (civil) cartographers, not “experience” designers
Civil Cartography rejects the notion that designers can be jacks-of-all-trades overnight. Just taking a workshop on “design thinking” doesn’t
Bringing (advanced) stats to junior tennis
Tennis players are often praised for their “work rate” — how much effort they put into moving around the court. But how exactly can we measure this?
Measuring the impact of (design) consequences
I’m tired of talking about design, I want to focus on what we’ve created. Design is inevitable. Like many unavoidable things, design constraints the
Service design wasn’t designed to serve everybody
As I prepare to teach a service design studio course in the winter at a university, I must grapple with my own frustrations with the inadequacies of
On Putting Yourself Out There
I chose to move to a more urban part of the city after the COVID lockdowns. My old area had coffee shops and food, a weekend buzz of people, but it
On Rage Tweets, Reddit & the painful silence of a post-twitter world
There’s something cathartic about putting half-baked ideas into the world and getting feedback. Losing Twitter is hard to quantify, even though I
Notes from the age of disengagement
We exist in the Age of Disengagement, an era marked by weaponized speech online where our words are not only used against us but also synthesized by
Bifurcated modalities
There is a youngish man who sits at the bus stop several days a week staring at his phone and watching something for what amounts to an 8-hour work
The endless cycle of blogging
I’ve been blogging for more than half my life at this point. My first blog platform was Movable Type, and then it all went from there. Most of my
Why I keep coaching
Players have to earn trust, but I like building a culture where players have agency to help direct their practices. I’m very vocal about asking
A Parliament of Neighbors
In about two weeks, I assembled some ideas I’d been kicking around about reinvention into an exhibition called “A Parliament of Neighbors”
On art & design
There’s some rad weird popup art space happening at the mall in May, I found it via ig and I’m kicking around trying to graft together a spatial
motivating-or-setting-realistic-goals-when-your-team-loses-a-lot
Motivating (or setting realistic goals when your team loses a lot) So these days, I’ve gotten pretty accustoming to coaching teams that compete for
American History Booklist
Back in 2016, I made a booklist of interesting books I’d read over the years that were worth sharing, because at that time there was were way fewer
Back to blogging again?
One of the things that’s been weird about the 2010s was how all of us who used to blog a lot stopped and transferred our content to places like
Postcards From Vimpeli
I traveled to Vimpeli, Finland for pesäpallo playoff game. Vimpeli, who are two years removed from back-to-back Finnish championships were taking on
On lineups, ladders & high school tennis
The conventional wisdom of most high school coaches (and college ones too) is the best way to determine a lineup is using head-to-head challenge
the-designers-share-of-the-problem
The Designers Share of the Problem (My IxDA Oslo talk) So this talk is really an anti-design designer talk. It was borne out of years of frustration
The Designer's Share of the Problem
Here is a high-level transcript of my from my talk “The Designer’s Share of the Problem” to IxDA Oslo on November 30, 2021 in Oslo. It’s mostly a
The hidden cost of everything
Last week, I ordered a pizza. Normally, I pick it up, but I was feeling especially tired last week so I had it delivered. The post-COVID world has
The cost of grey spaces
I’ve written previously about Liminal UX. I’ve been thinking about the ways these liminal spaces present themselves beyond interaction design and
The cost of trust
How far would you walk to save $2? How about driving across town to save yourself time? When contemplating the design of services, we’re often asked
Recommendations are poison
Social media recommendations make sense. Someone new joins a network and you think “we want them to stay, let’s find them some friends.” From its
Policy Harm
Much of the my personal frustration with the current state of web ideas are the lack of awareness around policy harms. The companion to policy harm
Liminal UX
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about liminalexperiences in user experience. Liminality defines the transitional states between
What is it?
I think consequence design is the doormat in front of the door that when you look underneath, insects who weren’t visible scurry in all directions.
Improving Oregon’s broken high school tennis format
Talking about a high school tennis format is a pretty niche discussion. Nonetheless, since I began coaching high school tennis in Oregon a few years
How does a guy from America start following Finnish baseball?
I’ve been trying for a while to tell anyone who’d listen about Pesäpallo, the sport that’s a close cousin to American baseball. The sport has
Naming the courts
Naming The Courts During my senior year, my high school tennis coach and I were talking about our season and his legacy. I joked that because of