Ash Mann (Page 2)

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Clocks, clouds, and the nature of digital problems

Not all digital challenges can be fixed with expertise alone. Understanding whether you’re facing a technical or adaptive problem can change how you lead, collaborate, and design solutions that actually work.

This week's best things #81

UX lessons from the BFI, coping strategies for workaholism, better alternatives to SWOT, weekly open content crits, a beautiful browser game, reflections on audio-led experiences, thoughtful takes on AI adoption, meeting culture, and unclear communication.

What Dobble can teach us about UX

Playing Dobble for the first time made me think about how our brains handle attention, clutter, and perception. The same principles that make the game chaotic also explain why some digital experiences feel effortless while others are exhausting.

This week's best things #80

Playing an instrument helps keep the brain young. Also: a museum of web design, innovation vs infrastructure, antifragility, Aurora Orchestra’s learning platform, sensory sculpture, design systems at the NHS, the “futures cone” as a way to think about uncertainty, and the “Age of Worth It.”

This week's best things #79

Content strategy and why distribution matters; Cory Doctorow on reversing the “enshittocene”; Rijksmuseum’s relational search; digital exhaustion; art’s measurable health benefits; Hugh on the fact that “people like real things”; imagination in leadership; and Sarah Hughes on “The Likability Trap”.

This week's best things #78

Cleveland Museum of Art’s revamped collection site, Atkinson Hyperlegible font, James Meek on AI desire, Lauren Pope on translating content for leaders, my piece on digital strategy focus, AWS outage bricking smartbeds, Herzog on Instagram.

The discipline of focus, what makes a digital strategy work

Good digital strategies aren’t long documents or laundry lists. They’re about ruthless focus - choosing a clear direction and sticking to it, even if that means letting go of attractive ideas. Here are some of the characteristics that make them effective.

This week's best things

Exploring "aliveness", remixing digital archives, Instagram story likes as digital affection, Gen Z’s revival of radio and landlines, The Stasi’s role in gaming, AI as “superhistory,” change leadership traps, poor service design, and more.

Reimagining purpose, value, and dealing with pressure

Many cultural leaders admit their organisations feel unsustainable. True resilience comes from reimagining purpose, not outputs or buildings, but the core that makes them indispensable to the public.

This week's best things

Lessons from a museum cyberattack, Welsh AI content support, the EU’s plan to fix cookie law chaos, a doomsday prediction tracker, hat/haircut/tattoo decisions, why writing in books boosts memory, Amazon’s decline, team focus research, cultural bias in GPT, and sitcoms in Yugoslavia.