This past summer, Paris was sweltering with record heat. One afternoon during a recent visit, I ducked into the shaded awning of a small bistro, mostly looking to escape the heat and grab a cold drink. Inside, fans whirred, carafes of water hit table tops, and people were doing what
The Etiquette of the Underworld During a recent trip to Japan, it took me about three days on the Tokyo Metro to realize I was experiencing a completely different social reality. At first, you just feel a vague relief that you cannot quite place: a sudden, quiet stillness in a
There is a strange, hollow feeling that comes from receiving a perfectly formatted, three-paragraph status update that you know your colleague didn’t actually write. You look at it. Your brain does a quick calorie-count of the effort required to parse it, and you instinctively hit the Summarize button. Now, you
The next time you find yourself standing in a checkout line, or waiting for a slow elevator, or sitting through the three-minute reboot of a laptop, notice the immediate, almost involuntary twitch of your hand toward your pocket. We have become a species that can no longer tolerate the gap.
We are living in a time of compression. Every facet of our modern lives—from the way we buy groceries to the way we find a partner—is being filtered through the lens of efficiency. We have become experts at identifying waste. We trim the fat from our schedules, automate our reminders,
The Paradox of Powerful Tools In the tech industry, we often fall into the trap of believing that if a tool is powerful enough, people will naturally use it. We are currently pouring billions into Artificial Intelligence, assuming that sheer computational “intelligence” will solve the future of work. But from
In the tech world, we often fall into the trap of describing software as a “utility”—like a digital hammer or a faster filing cabinet. But after over a decade in UX research, I’ve learned that this comparison is dangerously incomplete. When we introduce a new platform into a workplace, we