How IBM considered frogs as a non-human stakeholder in the design of a citizen science app. — Co-written with Isabella Bain (Lead designer of the FrogID app and former design director at IBM Australia) This is the third and final part of an article series discussing non-human personas as an emerging tool in UX design. …

How designers can capture the voices that represent non-human living beings. — This is the second part of a series of articles based on a recently published academic paper Non-Human Personas: Including Nature in the Participatory Design of Smart Cities, which I co-wrote with Joel Fredericks, Dan Vo and Jessica Frawley from the Sydney Design Lab and Marcus Foth from the More-than-Human…

Why it is time to move beyond just designing for humans. — This article is based on a recently published academic paper with the title Non-Human Personas: Including Nature in the Participatory Design of Smart Cities, which appeared in the Journal of Interaction Design & Architecture(s). …

By learning new things, our world grows. This can be scary. — In Haruki Murakami’s book Dance Dance Dance, the main character meets a famous novelist, who observes: “It didn’t use to be that way. The world was smaller, you could get a handle on things, you knew — or thought you knew — what you were doing.” Does he talk about…

We need to stop lying to ourselves. Designing a piece of software and not considering the impact this has on our Earth’s biosphere is like speeding down a highway blindfolded. Sure, we can blame the blindfold for the disastrous crash we have caused. But it won’t undo the crash. Our…

Preface: This article is adapted from an original article, co-written with M. Hank Haeusler, and published in mondo*arc April/May 2016 — Issue 90. The article was part of a series of publications in the lead-up to the Media Architecture Biennale 2016, which I chaired together with M. Hank Haeusler. Interested…

Some thoughts on how Covid-19 changed our vision for the 32nd Australian conference on computer-human interaction. — It’s been on my mind for many years—bringing the Australian conference for computer-human interaction (OzCHI) to Sydney. The last time it was held in Sydney was 2014. To my knowledge it had never been hosted by the University of Sydney. About 1.5 years ago, I finally felt that we had…

Why making a small move into the wrong direction is better than not making any move at all — I wrote the first draft of this story during a short visit to Stanford University. I was on my way back from UC Davis, where I attended the entrepreneurship academy, and had a few hours to kill before my flight to Sydney. I am editing this story sitting at my…

Co-written by Martin Tomitsch and Leigh-Anne Hepburn Like other design educators around the world, we had to very quickly transition all our units to an online mode in an effort to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Most of our courses in the University of Sydney’s Design Discipline involve human-centred design…