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Ash Mann

📍 Sweden

This week's best things #106

An ARG woven through the National Library of Scotland, team taxonomies, algorithmic sameness in culture, a British Library image search, a 'Six Thinking Hats' GPT, sauna theatre, Meta's failed AI overhaul, LinkedIn's AI slop button, and some words we need

Departments of Doubt and Wisdom Councils

Does your organisation have any structural mechanism for doubt at all? Somewhere that 'the plan' and core assumptions gets usefully challenged, by people who have no stake in defending them.

Conversations with other digital practitioners: what came out of the first two

I invited people working in and around cultural sector digital to spend an hour online comparing notes. Since the pandemic, the chance to bump into someone doing your job elsewhere seems to have faded. These sessions tried to rebuild it.

This week's best things #105

An archive of digital archives, the dark forests internet, a public ledger of design crimes, why AI workslop is a management failure, small orgs run on people and large ones on process, a culture map of decision-making styles, plus Artybollocks & Brandon Powers' Declaration Room.

This week's best things #104

The Met launches semantic search, the impact of 'decision debt', AI is rewiring how we think, write and collaborate, brand debt liability, accessibility is a practice not a project. Plus equidistant pubs, 3D seat views, and World Cup data portraits.

Not always invisible, but often hidden

'Invisible' wasn't always the right word for the hidden work I've been researching. After 180+ survey responses and a set of interviews, here's a four-level scale of visibility I hope you'll find useful.

This week's best things #103

Adaptive hierarchy, decision rights, eroding psychological safety, AI as environment, interface design, modern-work overload, IKEA reskilling, service design vs UX, public AI for cultural heritage, plus overmorrow, Criterion browsing, and No Clean Sheet.

This week's best things #102

Wifärt Gallery, a kerning tool, SMK's AI visitor guide, BFI's beta cinema site, Torchbox on user assumptions, No Web Without Women, digital trust, AI writing's shape, why innovation labs fail, the "illusion of effort" in AI-perceived work, and a wood-chopping simulator.

What Ikea stores could teach us about framing value

A look at how Ikea uses context and narrative to help people understand value.

This week's best things #101

Colours with histories, Doctorow on decline, RA archive play, bots now outnumber humans online, Edmondson on psychological safety, Loosemore updates his digital definition, HBR on AI use, public UX, BBC foresight from 2004, philosophers in AI, immersive experience psychology.