Why Do We Go to School?
To say that school is for learning is to miss huge amounts of what school and education are really doing. Learning can happen in all kinds of places and in all kinds of ways - lots of modern technologies, from YouTube to AI, can be really valuable tools for learning. But that is different from education.
Learning is a part of education, but it's never the whole picture. The goal of learning is that we have some new knowledge or new skills, but the goal of education is connected with the kinds of lives we wish to live and the kind of world we wish to live in.
Speaking at the Teach the Future Festival
Back at the start of September, I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Festivalul Digital Predau Viitor - the Teach the Future Festival in Romania. The festival has been running since 2022, and in its 2025 edition, saw over 5000 participants join talks, workshops, and events for the biggest education conference in the region. It’s a powerhouse event and is both a really impressive feat of logistical engineering and an expression of enormous commitment to education and educators in Romania.
Gaming the System
At the heart of both meaningful teaching and deep gameplay is the separation of our usual selves from our “learning” or “ludic” selves - between the everyday me and the “student” or “player” me. Who I am in the classroom or in the game is, in an important sense, a temporary me. This is a me that can experiment freely, make mistakes without fear, try new roles and rules, iterate, change, and shift. I can adopt new identities, new judgments, and try new activities.
Slow Learning
Like so much in our lives today, learning has been accelerated and commodified to try and offer instant results at low costs. We can take short-form classes on YouTube, SkillShare, Udemy, and dozens of other platforms. We can sign up for real-life classes and workshops. We can self-teach or join online communities. All of them offer quick skills at low prices. Inevitably some of that will be snake oil, people on the grift looking to extract money from those who want, or need, to learn new skills, improve their education, or expand their knowledge. Some of it, though, is high-quality, thoughtful, and impactful learning content. Telling which is which may be the trick, there.
One Star Reviews
Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.
Generative AI is the new Kalashnikov
In the discussion around generative AI a lot of the debate has focused around this same binary - truth and falsehood. Many are worried that the ability of generative AI tools to produce images, audio, video, and text may be used, or is already being used, to produce lies. Fake images, fake video, fake audio. That these powerful AI systems are a means of obscuring the truth or outright lying. We need, then, to clarify just what a lie might be, and why there is something more worrying hiding in plain sight.
The Spice Must Flow
Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.
It's Manipulation All the Way Down
If bad actors decide to release an AI-generated or computer-manipulated video or images of Joe Biden doing something that would sink his chances at a second presidential term then the world’s attention will fall upon them and every pixel will be minutely dissected by the best in the field. If images circulate purporting to show microbes in the soil of Mars, they will be examined forensically by the world’s experts. In both cases, I suspect the truth will out. But what happens when it’s not the headline-grabbing images that are manipulated, invented, or created by AI? We’re taking in hundreds, even thousands of images a day - the vast majority of which we’re giving no second thought to. It’s here that we’re most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.
As Little Design as Possible
I’ve long advocated that, whatever field or discipline you work in, you should always be looking at what is happening elsewhere. That might be in neighbouring industries or practices, but it might also be in fields that are very distant from your own. As a learning experience designer, I’m keenly interested in the work of designers in a whole range of industries - game design, architecture, graphic design and, of course, product design. I’m looking at what’s happening in these different disciplines to see if there is anything exciting, interesting, or innovative that I might find use for in my work as a designer. What, then, might a learning experience designer, take from Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Design?
Now is Now - Wim Wenders 'Perfect Days'
There is a scene about 90 minutes into Wim Wenders' enchanting film Perfect Days where our protagonist, Hirayama, is cycling over a bridge in Tokyo with his niece Niko. As the two of them cycle back and forth, weaving across the bridge in the sunset they call out, back and forth to each other, “Next time is next time, and now is now.” In a film that says very little explicitly, this seems like a pretty clear mission statement.
Input - Process - Output
There is a big funnel.
A huge, great, hungry thing.
Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.
At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.
The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.
Pausing
In his interview with Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki on the release of his masterpiece Spirited Away, Robert Ebert asked Miyazaki about the moments of rest in his films. Moments that showed what Ebert called “gratuitous motion” - a character sighing, sitting for a moment, looking to the distance. Moments that didn’t serve to advance the plot, or provide the audience with action, or provide comedy or drama in themselves.
Notebooks
Notebooks have been a huge part of my personal and working life for as long as I can remember. Almost everything I do, whether it’s writing, designing, planning, or thinking, begins on paper in some way or another. I find the immediacy and freedom of pencil and paper to be something that’s completely intertwined with the way that I think and see things.
Yearnote 2023
"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."
- Anthony Bourdain
Finding moments of joy
I really do try and find moments of joy in my every day life. It’s not easy, often, with the way the world is and the usual pressures and demands, but it’s still important to me to try.
When I was in Berlin last week the breakfast room had an automatic pancake machine. Reason enough for a moment of joy in the morning, all by itself. Even better, though, was my first time using it.
Graphic design
I used to do quite a bit of graphic design, especially when I was at university. I remember teaching myself basic photoshop from online tutorials in my late teens and then spending a lot of my time, once I got to university, designing posters for plays, college balls, club nights, charity events and things like that. I’ve still got a reasonable eye for good graphic design, I think, but it seems like my decades old skills have pretty firmly rusted up and - shocking as it may be - photoshop has changed a little in the intervening years.
Trusting the process
I've been designing some 1 day online workshops lately and I've been having trouble with one particular workshop. It just wasn't clicking for me, and I couldn't "see" the design as I could with the others. I like to think about the workshops I'm designing for a little while and let my subconscious go to work until things fall into place - and usually, that works pretty well. For some reason though it just wasn't working for me this time. I spent some time noodling away at it but wasn't really making any progress.
Thinking on a bigger scale
When I was a teacher, and had all the space of a classroom, it was very common for my students and I to be working away on huge sheets of A1 paper - drawing out some idea, or mindmapping a text we were studying, or collecting our thoughts together on some topic. We’d then tape them all up on to the way to have an even bigger frame of reference for our thinking.
Design Thoughts
I’m not a graphic designer by trade but graphic design does mean a lot to me and I’ve always had an eye for, and appreciation of, great design. Much in the words of that brilliant Ira Glass aphorism, I’ve got good taste in graphic design but my own skills… well, they’re not quite so developed yet.
On setting no alarms
Yesterday I caught a video on the Awwwards YouTube channel by Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co.
Draplin is an incredible, and prolific, graphic designer working out of Portland, Oregon in the US. His designs have punchy power, big colour, and vintage sensibilities and I’m a huge fan of the graphic design work he does for a whole range of impressive clients. He also does amazing work for friends, family, small-league businesses, start-ups, and, as he likes to say, “little guys and underdogs.”