fordes

“If only they would know what we know!…”

Developers should learn how to design user interfaces and everyone should learn how to code: The cry for a better education of others in ones own field is frequent: If they only knew what we know, the world would be better and …

I always wondered why open source projects love community-driven logo competitions (almost all logos of Wikimedia projects seem to have been created this way). What happens is this: A person or a group makes the case the the project needs a logo or needs an improved logo. If they are …

I research how people learn new skills using instructions. As fields, I selected working with people who learn programming and people who (re) learn cooking (some of them do so as they got a diagnosed with a condition that demands a new diet). Both fields work with very different materials …

Methods are a core topic in UX design. The human centered design cycle, Design Thinking steps or other variants that suggest how to structure one’s design activities. Not designing methodically is framed as wrong and as missing out on valuable insights ⁹. However, it is unclear if formally structured …

This is a text I thought about for a long time. I hoped that I would find a nice theory that someone else suggested for the observations I made, but I was unable to find one or maybe unable to see the ones I know from a perspective that made …

In discussions about equity in the web and in technology I often come across two terms: Gaps and Biases. Sometimes they are accompanied by barriers. It is said that, to achieve equity, we need to close gaps, correct biases and remove barriers.

“Gaps and Biases” had quite a career since …

Some days ago, I chatted with a colleague (Gabriel Birke, who writes on  Leben++) about a story telling card game in which the players develop a story based on prompt cards (based on the mechanics of “For the Queen”). He was programming a little web-based version of it. I reviewed …

There are some things that you don't do in an occupation. This might be using lots of glue instead of dowels for a carpenter or nesting several windows into each other if you are an interface designer. These things might be rationally explained: The carpenter might say they want to …

This is an edited text based on a talk Lisa Conrad, PhD and me gave at the EASST 2020 in the panel on classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) papers. I think the text is also interesting for computer scientists, design researchers and privacy researchers, so I post it here …

Whether in books or Wikipedia: A lot of knowledge is presented and edited as text. There is the assumption that this text reflects something about the world (if it is true and not wrong because of deceived senses, bad research, or lying). Such text can be written by a person …