Category: Uncategorized

Contemplations

I recently listened to a Longform podcast where the guest was Jesse David Fox, a comedy critic for Vulture magazine. Fox shared his unexpected journey into the worlds of comedy writing and watch collecting. His comedy adventure started when a friend took him to a Hannibal Buress show, sparking an obsession with the comedy scene and leading him to attend more shows and engage with related podcasts and readings. This passion and expertise would lead to a career at Vulture.

During the pandemic, he became interested in watch collecting. He started by watching clips of porn stars’ conversations on TikTok, which led him to YouTube for more content from them. These porn stars started recommending Antique Roadshow clips. He watched a particular clip featuring a Vietnam war veteran who brings a watch which he has never worn once but kept since the war. It gets valued at a million dollars and the man falls to the floor ecstatic. Fox is captivated and this leads to a deeper exploration of watch-related content on YouTube and the Internet.

Fox draws parallels between his interests in comedy and watches, noting how both fields appear mundane from the outside but are rich and complex upon deeper investigation. His expertise in both fields emerged from his obsessive consumption of relevant content about them. Fox’s story exemplifies the “Zulu Principle”.

The Zulu Principle was coined by Jim Slater. It’s the title of his financial investment book (2008) based on an insight he had as a result of his wife reading a four-page Reader’s Digest article on Zulus. He stated that if she had gone to the local library and borrowed all the available books on Zulus she could find, then she would become one of the leading experts in their city on the subject. If she had travelled to South Africa and lived in a Zulu kraal for several months and studied all the literature on Zulus at a South African university, then she would have gone on to be one of the top experts in the UK and possibly in the world.

Slater believed that the more you focus on an area, then, the easier it is to become an expert in that area. This expertise gives you a competitive advantage over others. The power of compound interest. 

Consumptions

The Killer (2023) – This is one of the best movies I have watched this year. Michael Fassbender portrays a contract killer who seeks retribution after a botched mission leads to his handler commissioning a hit on him as punishment. The movie highlights the professionalism, diligence, and patience required in being a hitman, featuring a lot of waiting. The killer is depicted as a predator, coiled and ready for the ideal opportunity and time to strike its prey. This film reminds me of a classic revenge thriller, “Payback” (1999). Fassbender’s performance is cool and detached, contrasting with Mel Gibson’s manic and raging portrayal in Payback.

My favourite scene is the dialogue between the killer and the expert (Tilda Swinton) in the restaurant, which is very Tarantinoesque. Swinton, in only a cameo role, is fantastic, making the most of her limited screen time. The film’s use of inner monologue is refreshing, as it allows the viewer to get into the killer’s head.

There are some humorous inner monologue descriptions of two cities visited by the killer in the film:

“A place with a thousand restaurants and one menu!” (New Orleans)

“Where else can you find so many like-minded individuals outside a penitentiary?” (Florida)

American Symphony (2023) – This documentary features the talented married couple Jon Batiste (musician) and Suleika Jaouad (writer). It focuses on the juxtaposition of Batiste organising a concert (American Symphony) while supporting his wife through chemotherapy. The film explores the grace and strength of the couple as they navigate the highs and lows of their lives. Jaouad had successfully fought leukaemia in her early twenties and was ten years cancer-free before it returned in 2021. She created a powerful TED talk about her first leukaemia experience, discussing her struggle to adjust to a new reality of being cancer-free. Watching the TED talk and American Symphony made me realise that the line between the healthy and the sick is as fragile as a spider’s silk.

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World Music Radio by Jon Batiste – This is the first music album review to feature on this site, primarily because I don’t listen to as much music as I should. I must admit, I didn’t know who Jon Batiste was until I saw the trailer for the Netflix documentary “American Symphony”, which prompted me to check out his songs on Spotify. And wow!

World Music Radio truly exemplifies its name, featuring Batiste collaborating with international artists from Spain to Nigeria. I particularly enjoyed Batiste’s radio show-style disc jockeying outros on several tracks, where he announces and introduces the next track. This album is a fun, good-vibes pop collection. Kudos to Batiste for producing such an album, especially considering the challenges in his personal life. The album is a fusion of jazz, gospel, soul, funk, R&B, and hip-hop – a delectable musical medley!

Contemplations

I recently watched a couple of shows (see Consumptions section below) that explore time travel themes. The protagonists travel back and forth in time, affecting their timelines. This reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books and a personal CYOA real-life story.

As a teenager, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, interactive works by Edward Packard. In these books, the reader, at the bottom of each page, is presented with two choices leading to more binary decisions with varied consequences. CYOA books have multiple endings and your job as the reader is to make the best decisions on behalf of the protagonist

It’s summer 2006, and I am at Carlisle train station, waiting for my connecting train to Newcastle, having just completed a job interview for a research assistant role at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). My phone rings with a job offer from UCLAN, and at the same time, I receive a call from the University of Sheffield, where I had interviewed two days earlier. I ask UCLAN for 48 hours to decide and do the same with Sheffield when they offer me a research role. If Sheffield hadn’t called at the same time as UCLAN, I would have immediately accepted UCLAN’s offer. This crucial moment of simultaneous calls profoundly influences my decision, eventually leading me to choose Sheffield and turn down UCLAN’s offer.

Choosing Sheffield led to meeting my wife and influenced a significant branch of my life, including the people I met thereafter. A decision for UCLAN would have created a different timeline. Many decisions have shaped my life, but none as distinctly binary as that moment at Carlisle train station.

The poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost captures this sentiment. Here are the first and last stanzas of the poem.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

—–

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Consumptions

Bodies – A Netflix sci-fi limited series set in London, spanning four distinct timelines (1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053). It features four detectives investigating a case involving the same dead body, which is being transported through time to the same location in London.

The series excels in using a nested storytelling loop format, seamlessly transitioning the viewer from one protagonist in one timeline to another without overwhelming the viewer. The show creators also nailed the cliffhangers for the first few episodes to keep you engaged for the next one

Initially, I was reluctant to watch Bodies, but it proved to be far better than anticipated, especially given that it is adapted from a graphic novel of the same name. Graphic novels are notoriously hard to adapt to the screen, especially the small screen. Amaka Okafor as DS Shahara Hasan was a delight in Bodies. 

Loki S2 – Tom Hiddleston delivers another superb performance as Loki in the second season. Season 2 builds upon the solid foundation laid in Season 1, introducing new characters and developing the narrative arcs of the main protagonists. We see more of ‘He Who Remains’ (Jonathan Majors), portraying one of his variants from the 1890s. The season concludes with a sense of finality for the entire series, although whether Tom Hiddleston returns for another season remains to be seen.

Everything that Marvel released used to be a hit but now the misses exceed the hits.  I find most of the Marvel TV shows to be lacklustre and the best ones for me have been Loki and Moon Knight.

Nerdwriter’s excellent video essay discusses the challenges associated with the need to consume most of Marvel’s content to grasp its interconnected storytelling universe. This becomes problematic as the quality of Marvel’s content has been in decline.

Please share your favourite Marvel TV shows in the comments below.

Contemplations

Bookmark Project Highlights

• Kerry Davies and Mary Phillip, who are two of the pioneering Black Lionesses featured on the bookmarks, emailed me to express their gratitude for the work I had done and requested bookmarks for themselves and their loved ones. Kerry stumbled upon the bookmark project while browsing the web in relation to Black History Month. It was an honour to send the bookmarks to these remarkable women. This stands out as a significant achievement for me, considering the time, effort, and finances I invested in the Black Lionesses project.

• A mutual acquaintance connected me with Councillor Vanessa Boateng of Knowsley Town Council in Liverpool. She expressed interest in obtaining some bookmarks for a Black History Month event at the town council later in October. I removed the Kent Libraries content and logo and replaced them with Knowsley Town’s own, creating a personalised Black Lionesses bookmark for her event. It was a great opportunity to expand the reach of the bookmarks.

• I was invited to exhibit the Black Lionesses’ bookmarks at a London FA + Football Beyond Borders event to celebrate Black History Month. The event took place at Wembley Stadium, and it was my first time visiting the stadium. Despite the rain showers, it was an enjoyable event. I had the opportunity to discuss the bookmark project and my previous football projects with event attendees.

Read more about the Black Lionesses bookmark project here.

Freelancing

I am still actively seeking freelance user research work. If you or your organisation have any upcoming projects that could benefit from my skills, please do not hesitate to reach out. I would love to learn more and explore how I can contribute. You can also check out my LinkedIn profile here.

Consumptions

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The Continental – This three-episode limited series serves as a prequel to the John Wick film series. It delves into the origin story of Winston and Charon, set in the 1970s, and explores how Winston came to be the proprietor of the Continental Hotel. I personally enjoyed it, even though I’m aware it received mixed reviews. The series incorporates similar action sequences from the John Wick franchise. it was refreshing to see a diverse cast, particularly strong diverse female characters.

The series also employs a storytelling technique reminiscent of “Breaking Bad,” where a scene is introduced at the beginning of the episode, whether it’s a flashback or flash-forward, seemingly unrelated to the immediate scenes. However, the significance becomes clear by the end of the episode, adding depth to the narrative. As a fun fact, it’s revealed that Charon hails originally from Nigeria.

Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul – This four-episode limited series on Netflix, which explores the rise and fall of Juul, will interest product development nerds. It chronicles the journey of two Stanford graduates who initially created a vaping product with noble intentions but witnessed its corruption due to pressure from investors focused on growth and profit.

Juul, an e-cigarette product, was originally conceived to provide smokers with an alternative to traditional cigarettes. It was so slickly designed that it earned the tag “the iPhone of e-cigarettes.” However, a company established to disrupt the tobacco industry eventually adopted similar youthful lifestyle marketing tactics and secured substantial investments from Big Tobacco.

Ultimately, Juul was a nicotine company masquerading as a tech company, reminiscent of the trajectory of WeWork in the real estate sector. Both companies achieved high market valuations assigned to tech companies, only to crash and burn.

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Game of Edges – I’m a passionate fan of books on sports analytics, so I couldn’t resist picking up “Game of Edges” when I spotted it in the bookshop. A strength of this book is its coverage of analytics across various sports, including basketball, baseball, football, and American football. Many books in this genre tend to concentrate on one specific sport. While I was already familiar with several of the case studies, particularly those from the world of baseball and football, I was delighted to discover some new insights from basketball and American football.

Sports teams employ data analytics to identify inefficiencies within the industry to gain a competitive edge over their rivals. It has evolved into an arms race to secure the most brilliant data scientists who can create models harnessing the power of machine learning to interpret the data.

Schoenfeld contends that a negative consequence of this arms race is the erosion of sports as an entertainment spectacle for fans, as coaching and organisational decision-making become overly reliant on statistical models.

Contemplations

On Endings and Beginnings

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end –

Semisonic (verse from the song – Closing Time)

It’s a new season and the start of Q4 – the final quarter of 2023. Q2 finished with redundancy at work (ending). While in Q3, I started and finished two new projects (beginnings/endings).

These were the Black Lionesses bookmark project and a freelance research project for the Nuffield Foundation.

I now find myself at the start of Q4 looking for a new freelance gig and a new creative side project. I have been reaching out to folks and brainstorming new ideas but no joy so far.

The challenge is avoiding getting sucked into a vortex of anxiety and uncertainty. These are the ups and downs of being a freelancer and seeking new beginnings.

Consumptions

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The Creator – I went to see this film at the Odeon cinema with my wife. I haven’t been to the cinema in ages so it was good to watch a movie on a big screen with an audience. I enjoyed the film. It featured strong performances from John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Alison Janney.

The film focuses on America’s war against AI because of a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles due to an AI error. The battleground is ‘Neo Asia’, a continent, which is peacefully co-existing with AI.

The protagonist is Joshua, an AI sceptic, who bonds with an AI child (Alphie) during his quest to find his wife. He spends the film seeking redemption to atone for his betrayal. I am glad to see John David Washington doing another smart, layered sci-fi movie after his standout role in Tenet.

Best scene dialogue

Alfie: What’s heaven?

Joshua: It’s a peaceful place in the sky.

Alfie: Are you going to heaven?

Joshua: No.

Alfie: Why not?

Joshua: You gotta be a good person to go to heaven.

Alfie: Then we’re the same. We can’t go to heaven. Because you’re not good. And I’m not a person.

I mentioned in a previous post about a side project idea I was working on. This idea was developed at a summer Black Design Guild retreat. 

 I am pleased to announce that the idea is now a product available from October at all Kent Libraries to celebrate Black History Month (BHM). 

I wanted to combine my love for books and libraries with football for a Black History Month project based on this year’s theme: ‘Saluting Our Sisters.’

This summer’s Women’s World Cup was my creative inspiration. I thought of the England national team known as the ‘Lionesses’ and wondered about the identities of all the Black Lionesses that have ever played for the team.

I had the BHM bookmark idea in June, went to two nearby local libraries to discuss it with their librarians and got positive feedback. 

One librarian encouraged me to contact a Kent Libraries’ Service Development Officer with the idea; she was receptive and passed it on to senior leadership who commissioned it.

I approached a few designers for bookmark design advice. One of them said: 

“Don’t try to overthink a bookmark. These things are generally very simple designs.” 

This became my design philosophy for the rest of the project.

The first task was to research the names of all the Black Lionesses. I had to trawl through this Wikipedia page containing all England’s national female players to identify those with Black ancestry. 

This involved clicking each listed name to be directed to the player’s Wikipedia page but not all players had a Wikipedia page. I found 21 players who met my criteria. 

I then discovered a blog post on the JJHeritage website that had the names of all the Black female players from 1972 until 2021. The Football Association (FA) only started to assign official appearance caps to female national players in 1972. The blog post revealed two additional players that needed to be added to my list of 21. 

I collated these 23 Black Lionesses in a spreadsheet but was keen to ensure that I didn’t accidentally exclude anyone. This led to contacting The Football Association (FA) to verify my data. The FA team confirmed that only these 23 Black Lionesses have played for the national team so far. 

Kent Libraries had some requirements before they would be willing to issue the free bookmarks to their patrons. The inclusion of the Kent Libraries’ logo, the logo of the Black History Month charity, a QR code to a curated list of Black-authored books, a link for patrons who couldn’t access the QR code and a short text. 

I had to incorporate all these requirements with the names of the 23 Black Lionesses and a Black Stories, Black History image in a 51 x 152 mm bookmark. 

I presented the 23 players’ names as a word cloud. The biggest names in the cloud were the first players to play for England because I wanted to emphasise their pioneering legacy. 

I sent the final design version to the Kent Libraries’ team and they gave me the sign-off. I then ordered a sample of 5 printed copies from VistaPrint to see what the prototype looked like.

I shared the printed prototypes with the Kent Libraries’ team and they were still happy with it. 4900 copies are on their way to 99 Kent Libraries. 

Visit your local library in October If you live in the Kent area to get the BHM bookmark. I will suggest you do it as soon as you can because the libraries have limited copies.  

I have three goals for this bookmark:

• It creates an awareness of the 23 Black female players who have played for the England national team.
• It serves as a commemorative Black History Month product that lasts beyond October. 
• It inspires some football-loving Black girls who see this bookmark to one day join this list. 

This has been a fun project to work on. I want to thank the Kent Libraries’ team and everyone who provided support throughout the project. 

Epilogue:

I have written about some highlights and impact since the bookmarks went live in October in this post here

Contemplations

Collaborations

As a user researcher, I’m in the insights business. My job is to detect the signal in the cloud of noise; make sense of the signal and communicate that signal to others to take action. 

But we are all built to seek insights in our daily lives. Our brains are wired to connect dots and pattern recognise. We see patterns in situations where no patterns exist because this is the way we process ambiguity. 

Anybody can connect the dots if we remove the non-dots. It’s the ability to discern the dots from the non-dots that allows ‘true’ connections to be made. It is so easy to see what we want to see because we see things not as they are but as we are. 

I always have to remind myself that my assumptions and frames of reference are subjective lenses of reality. It’s biased and filters every piece of information I consume. That’s the reason I enjoy collaborating with individuals of diverse backgrounds. They provide subjective points of view in contrast with mine so they spot what I miss and vice versa.

Consumptions

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Foundation season 2 –  I got into Foundation late – a year after the first season came out but once I got into it; I was hooked. It is an intellectual sci-fi show based on a series of books by Isaac Asimov. The story was considered unfilmable given its hundreds of years time span but the show’s creators have done a marvellous job. I am consuming season 2 weekly so I have something to look forward to every Friday. I will recommend you watch this clip and hopefully your curiosity will be piqued to give the show a try.

Underrated – This Steph Curry documentary is good but not great. It does well fleshing out Curry’s pre-NBA backstory. The NBA years were tacked on at the end of the documentary as an afterthought. This is where the documentary lets itself down. Curry’s four NBA championship victories needed fleshing out. This documentary should have been a TV series and not a movie. This would have given the creators the room to let the story breathe. Hopefully, that will happen someday and I look forward to that.

Destination NBA: A G League Odyssey – I loved this basketball documentary which showcased the stories of a few G League players’ dreams to get into the NBA. I wasn’t aware of the G League until this documentary. These are basketball players betting on themselves when the odds of most of them getting into the NBA are very slim

Contemplations

Redundancy

I recently got made redundant. The last time I was made redundant; I pivoted from academia to UX. The lean academic job market at the time was the reason for this decision. I am not looking to pivot again but exploring the possibility of doing freelance UX gigs.

Redundancy is a gut punch and having experienced one before doesn’t make the second one any less painful. But like Weston said to Charon in John Wick 4: “Such is life.”

Consumptions

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• The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist – I try to mix up my reading diet with the inclusion of graphic novels. This was an enjoyable read by Adrian Tomine. A collection of short graphic vignettes of Tomine’s life from 1982 to 2018. They cover a range of themes such as obscurity, recognition, perseverance, parenthood and insecurities. Tomine manages to illustrate the comedy in certain situations of his life.
• How to do great work – This is a long essay by Paul Graham but it is worth your time. I generated so many Readwise highlights from this essay.

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don’t let “work” mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you’ll be driving your part of it.

Paul Graham

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Quarterback – I am a big fan of sports documentaries particularly American Football so it was a joy to binge this limited series. The show focuses on three quarterbacks {Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota} during the 2022 football season. It charts their ups and downs as they try to lead their teams to the playoffs and Super Bowl glory.

I was one of 10 Black professionals selected to participate in the pilot Black Design Guild {BDG} retreat at the beautiful Elmley Nature Reserve this month. The aim of the retreat was to enable junior and mid-level designers and researchers to recharge, reflect, and remerge with a fresh enthusiasm for the future.

I had a wonderful experience and hope the organisers are able to secure the required funding to run the scheme for 5 more years. Their attention to detail in terms of location choice, activities, participants, and fire chat speakers was top-notch. I will recommend checking out the BDG Medium site for blog posts and photos.

Reflections & Takeaways

• We had a magical storytelling session led by Usifu Jalloh {the cowfoot prince} which featured music and dance. He emphasised the importance of discovering who you truly are. He said his career only took off when he discovered who he was as a storyteller. We all have several strengths and passions and but we need to know which ones constitute the point of the arrow {primary strengths} and which ones are the supporting strengths {shaft, fletching, and nock of the arrow}.

• I was able to reflect at the retreat on past projects and passions to identify key personal themes and came up with a good-enough succinct response to the question of Who am I?

I am a multimedia storyteller who researches and curates mainly Black historical stories for a multicultural audience. I am a believer in the FUBU {For Us By Us} storytelling philosophy.

• The goal for the rest of the year is to use the statement above as a prism to select the types of stories and passion projects I pursue. I did a number of passion projects a few years ago which I enjoyed. The Black Design Guild retreat is responsible for rekindling the motivation to start doing new side projects. I kickstarted a new Black History Month project the day after the retreat ended. I am having fruitful conversations and will be providing status updates in the coming weeks and months. Watch this space.

I recently listened to an episode of Lenny’s Podcast where he interviewed Scott Belsky {Adobe product leader}. There was a bit of the conversation that resonated with me because I was conducting research on the Kano product model for a project at the time.

“And the other thing that perplexes me is that product leaders expect people to talk about a product being great. And people don’t talk about a product doing exactly what they expected it to do. They talk about a product doing what they didn’t expect. And you look at a product like Tesla. People are not going and talking about how they had a great drive today, but they’re talking about the cool new feature they discovered on the dashboard ….Why aren’t we optimising for those things that people wouldn’t expect the product to do as a way to get that surprise and delight to talk about it, to develop a relationship with our products?” {Scott Belsky}

Belsky’s observation aligns with the theory of the Kano product model which is generally used for feature prioritisation. This framework was developed by Dr Noriaki Kano, a professor of quality management from Tokyo University in the 1980s.  He came up with five different types of feature categorisation to help product teams prioritise which features they build. 

1. Must-have features

2. Performance features

3. Delight features

4. Indifferent features

5. Reverse features

Kano’s delight features exemplify the type of features described by Belsky in the quote mentioned earlier. These features pleasantly surprise users by exceeding their expectations, leading to a sense of delight. Delight features often generate word-of-mouth recommendations and positive user feedback.

Must-have features and Performance features are important and should rightly be prioritised but such features don’t excite users enough to spread the word about your product. Users expect them to be available in your product as a given for them to continue to use. 

It’s the unexpected features that delight and surprise them that will nudge them to evangelise your product. Surprise and delight are powerful emotional drivers for word-of-mouth recommendation. 

Product teams should avoid building surprising or delightful features for the sake of it. They need to build delightful features that solve user problems in functional and purposeful ways. 

Apple’s iPhone was the first mainstream smartphone to launch without a physical keyboard. The most popular phone at the time was the Blackberry which had half of its phone’s surface occupied by a keyboard. Apple wanted to maximise the entire phone screen for users and knew they had to get rid of the physical keyboard to do this. They introduced the touch screen feature to accomplish this goal.  Most smartphones today come with touchscreen functionalities. But in 2007 when Apple released the iPhone; this feature was a big talking point because nothing like it existed.

What unexpected delightful features/products have you encountered that compelled you to recommend them to others? Please share below in the comment section.

ABC – “Always Be Closing”. This is a famous line in a movie called Glengarry Glen Ross {1992}. Alec Baldwin plays the role of an aggressive salesman sent from head office to motivate a group of struggling real estate agents. He kept repeating this line as an inspirational mantra: ABC – “Always Be Closing”

A better mantra however for creatives is ABS – “Always Be Shipping”.

You put in the work to produce a creative output you deem satisfactory and then ship it by sharing it with the world. It’s up to the world to decide how it responds to your work. 

Your job is to do the work and ship it but the audience’s reaction is out of your control. So seek to manage the only controllable thing – the creation and shipping of your work. Do that and move on to the next piece of creative work.

As Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac interface, said, “You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.” {via The Practice by Seth Godin}

I like the end of Kare’s quote. “if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful” However, even without luck, you will still have the opportunity to develop your creative muscles through continuous shipping.

Finishing and shipping your work is a good habit to develop. Produce enough good content over time, and eventually, something will resonate with your audience.

What might be hindering you from completing and shipping your creative work? What are you doing to overcome such obstacles?

 Please provide your responses in the comments box below.