Dr Laura James's writings

Doteveryone has published our "definition of done". What does it mean to finish a piece of work?  What does good advocacy, protest or resistance work look like now? It turns out clear communication is important. Don Norman on replacing "Yes, and" with "Yes, but, and" - Note that the “but” anticipating the “and” is essential. In order to build on your idea, your colleague does not just add a new improved proposal. First, she provides a critique, which enables you to receive precious and specific information, see weaknesses in your half-backed idea you couldn’t spot yourself, and therefore learn. You and the entire team will then be ready to dive deeper into the next iteration. It is the combination of “but” and “and” that creates real progress, enabling the team to see both positive and negative components and allowing each iteration to go even deeper into the analysis. Research from the Collective Impact Forum on funding for 'backbone' wor...

This year's Festival of Maintenance takes place in Liverpool on Saturday 28th September.  Maintenance is a fascinating topic, cutting across so many parts of our lives and our world, and yet often neglected in how we think about things. Last year's event was very well received and we were delighted to be covered by the BBC World Service and in the Economist, suggesting that perhaps it's the start of a new surge of interest. So the 2019 Festival is a great opportunity to find out why maintenance matters, and to explore maintenance in a complex and changing world. Tickets are just £15 and we have some great speakers and intriguing themes lined up: We start with opening talks from Donna Young, Herbarium Curator, Liverpool World Museum, on keeping dead things dead, and Ben Ward on community IoT sensor networks as a self-made burden. Climate crisis With environmental factors so certain, our built environment will require a far higher value placed on maintenance than at...

I've had Steven Jackson's paper on repair in my reading stack for months. I think I first came across it via Lee Vinsel's Maintainers graduate seminar syllabus . It situates maintenance within socio-technical studies, examining the broken world, the role of the fixer as distinct from the user or designer in innovation, and the risks of focussing on nostalgia or heroism as frames for maintenance. Secondly, attention to maintenance and repair may help to redirect our gaze from moments of production to moments of sustainability and the myriad forms of activity by which the shape, standing, and meaning of objects in the world is produced and sustained—a feature especially valuable in a field too often occupied with the shock of the new. Via Festival of Maintenance team-mate Naomi Turner, an article by Jesse Weaver on resilience as a key design imperative for the future - because we've forgotten to do this recently. We don’t like to think about worst-case sc...