I've always had a creative curiosity that involves making, designing, and finding creative solutions to problems, this led me to using digital tools and lecturing in interactive media. As technology, society, and design have developed so to has my knowledge and experience in these fields enabling me to understand and develop the unique skills that are required to create successful solutions in the digital design process. I do this through creating and designing interventions in the physical space to ask questions and raise awareness of our use of technology and the impact on our awareness of time and space and the world around us.
I wrote
User Experience Design: An Introduction to Creating Interactive Digital Spaces
Invisible women reminds us, as designers, and responsible citizens, of the biases that exist in everyday society.
Through a series of examples ranging from medical trials to transport systems Criado Perez shows how, what might appear as systems and structures designed for all, are in fact, gender biased. UX Designers inherently know that they are not designing for themselves, but remembering to question established systemic biases is vital in the process.
This book reminds us of the importance of doing that for everyone and understanding the needs of all users.
Winner of the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize
Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
Sherry Turkle has written many books about our relationship with technology; in Alone Together she cleverly uses a wide range of technological examples, from robots as carers to curating social media profiles, each draw on her experience and research working at MIT.
She uses technology to hold a lens up to ask what it is to be human and what is important to society both individually and collectively, saying, “We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes? – a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are”.
Each of the arguments and examples are key to considering the tools that UX designers are creating and the roles that they play in shaping society: Turkle says, “We remake ourselves and our relationships with each other through our new intimacy with machines”.
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as MIT technology and society specialist Sherry Turkle argues, as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down. Even the presence of sociable robots in our lives that pretend to demonstrate empathy makes us feel more isolated, as Turkle explains in a new introduction updating the book to…
Marshall McLuhan, in his book The Medium Is the Massage, introduces the idea that "all media are extensions of some human faculty... The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye... clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system." All of this, McLuhan says, alters the way that we see the world around us and how we interact with it.
This is a must-read for all who work with or study media as it makes the reader question the very medium that we use to interact with each other and see how this impacts how we interpret and experience the world around us. This is vital to beginning to understand how to utilise the medium that you are working with.
In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics
Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many…
In this book Don Norman, through human centered design, unpacks and helps us understand the value and impact that the objects around us can have.
He helps the reader see these objects from a fresh perspective. Through looking at the different ‘levels of design’—visceral, behavioural, and reflective—and the importance of emotional machines, he explores the shared role that technology, design, and people play in manipulating their environment.
Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colourful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker . Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.Norman draws on…
Stuff is a great book for understanding material culture; how we value objects and the role that they play in our lives.
From a sari to a mobile phone or website, what is our relationship to these objects and what role do they play in our relationship with the world around us? Stuff looks at each of these questions from an anthropological view.
A key chapter in Stuff looks at technology from this viewpoint and unpacks what we mean by technology and the role that technology plays in influencing and forming society. It not only looks at how we form technology but also how it forms us.
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff.
The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of…
We all engage with digital user experience design and user interfaces every day. The book is an invaluable introduction for designers and creatives on how to create successful digital environments for users.
This book takes you through the crucial stages and skills that are needed for creating successful interactive digital environments, including Data collection, User analysis, Testing, Creating valid content, Design for different devices and platforms and Prototyping and visualization. Visual examples range from screenshots to diagrams and physical prototypes, while case studies featuring digital agencies and creatives from around the world show how they approach each project.
From the time I was a girl, I’ve loved stories that put a lump in my throat even as I’m laughing. As a fiction writer, that funny-sad tone is the one I go for in my own work. I gravitate toward female protagonists of all ages who break the mold—women who are intelligent and strong but who also have unconventional, quirky personalities. Women who can be hilarious, infuriating, and heartbreaking—sometimes all at once. Because they are complex and unique, these women tend to struggle with life’s challenges more than their contemporaries. That’s what makes their stories so interesting, and why I have chosen the books on this list.
When Mar’s husband divorces her, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy starting over, she’s ready for new adventures—as long as she can keep things casual. Each month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical consultant. . . and a handsome novelist who wants more than she can give. Mar learns from each encounter. But can she open herself up to true connection?
Surrounded by quirky, endearing characters, Mar navigates her…
"A fun, entertaining novel! I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't enjoy this book as much as I did." -Leslie A. Rasmussen, award-winning author
When Mar Meyer's husband divorces her for another woman, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy to start over, Mar is young-looking, fit, and ready for new adventures-as long as she can keep things casual.
With each passing month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next. Among them: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical…
