There's a particular kind of horror that comes with being a new design leader. It's the slow, dawning realisation that all the skills that made you a brilliant designer are becoming dull. This is the…
In the world of design leadership, there are two types of leader you're likely to meet. Both are charming and both will promise you the world. One, The Pilot, will guide your company to a safe…
Being a Ship’s Master is one of the most stressful jobs on the planet. Their single greatest fear isn't a storm; it's the threat of criminalisation after an incident. In the old world, their only…
The design world is collectively losing its mind over a great, job-destroying monster called Artificial Intelligence. The debate is a tedious tug-of-war between utopians who think we'll all be…
In shipping, a simple change in the weather can light the fuse on a multi-million-pound logistical bomb. A single, delayed ETA triggers a cascade of chaos for the shoreside team, from lost berthing…
The global shipping industry is in the middle of its most profound transformation in a century: decarbonisation. While engineers and regulators argue about the merits of methanol versus ammonia, they…
In the world of design leadership, a tedious civil war is being fought over a simple question: where should designers live? In one camp are the "Embedded" purists who create lonely design hermits. In…
In most companies, success is a magnificent piece of corporate theatre, a parade of meaningless charts that all point up and to the right. This plague of "success theatre" is fuelled by a single,…
As designers, we often complain that the business world doesn't 'get' design. The hard truth? It's our fault. We talk about empathy and delight; they talk about profit and loss. If you're tired of…
Before I designed software, I designed physical things. In that world, a mistake meant a furnace full of money. A look at the 'one-way door' decisions of industrial design and the healthy, productive…
Every company has two sets of software: the official, expensive stuff that everyone is supposed to use, and the secret, unofficial toolkit that people actually use to get their job done. It’s the…
Most design critiques are, frankly, spirit-crushing. Here’s the story of how our own feedback meeting spectacularly failed, and the brutally simple, Google-inspired process we built from the wreckage…
