A New Approach to Designing Smart Cities

One day, I’d like to design a truly modern, functional city with the character of a medieval hill town.

Rather than a blueprint, I’d like to design a series of recipes for how to create it, from the community to individual human…

Blockchains and Banks

As we worked with Eris Industries in the Anthemis Foundry, we came across the conundrum concerning blockchains: Bitcoin bundled together various existing technologies in a unique fashion to create something genuinely new — an almost unhackable, replicated database with no master server…

Design vs Marketing

Apple’s history of design vs marketing from Pepsi to Beats

Apple was the company that proved the business value of design, a very important precedent in Silicon Valley since as technology matures it is not sold based on features…

Money and Entropy

Nobody knows what money is.

Blockchains Are Not About Decentralization

Decentralization is not a useful feature of blockchains, it’s a necessary limitation…

The End of the Design Era in Technology.

The aesthetics of creative innovation in technology are split into two cultures — a design one (productivity and efficiency) and a narrative one (stories, entertainment and games). The design one is of the way things look and work: minimalism; Apple; flat…

There is no Such Thing as Invention

Ideas are Discovered not Created

Calculus was invented twice, Natural Selection discovered twice and the telephone was patented twice.

The UX of Banking

Why Retail Banking Services are Necessarily Badly Designed and Why Changing that May…

The World’s Money in Numbers

As of 2015 unless indicated.

I’ll produce a chart of this data once it is sufficiently complete.

Global financial assets: $300 trillion