TALKS
I give three talks. One is for design students and early-career designers, about where a critical practice actually comes from. One is for schools, youth organisations and policy people, about teaching teenagers the mechanism instead of policing their screen time. One is for product teams, and it’s the method I use on client work, run live on a real interface. All three come out of the same argument: interfaces aren’t neutral, and you can read the business model off the screen if you know what to look for.
Developing Taste in the age of AI
Everyone in design has decided taste is the last skill worth having — and it's spiking at the exact moment the public routes to judgment are being defunded. 'Develop your taste' is the privatisation of judgment dressed as self-improvement. The talk discysses the mechanism with Bourdieu's theories, then gets practical about how you build a viewpoint anyway — staying somewhere weird on the internet long enough to notice its texture, being nosy past the point it's useful, and reading digital desire paths instead of the paved ones. I don't hedge it, and I show my working, because the point is the move and not my opinion.
for — design students, graduate showcases, early-career designers, anyone deciding whether their opinions are a liability
Ban the Harm, Not the Child
Everyone arguing about whether to ban teenagers from social media is arguing about the wrong noun. My honours research proposed a blended course teaching 13–14 year olds to recognise persuasive design in the products they already use — built after speaking to headteachers about what they were actually seeing, and grounded in autonomy and children’s rights rather than abstinence. The talk covers what the research found, why screen-time limits target the one party with no lobby and no lawyers, what Australia’s ban actually did after December 2025, and what design-level regulation would look like instead.
for — schools, teachers and parent groups, youth and children’s-rights organisations, policy and public-sector audiences
How to Read an Interface
The method, run live rather than described. Interface analysis treats a product as evidence of the business model, ideology and power relations underneath it — which changes the questions you ask: not ‘can the user complete the task’ but which tasks the interface expects, who benefits, what’s quietly omitted, and what kind of person the product imagines its user to be. I walk a real product through the read, including the one I did for a daily reflection app whose whole position was refusing to gamify. Teams leave able to run it themselves.
for — product and design teams, in-house sessions, agencies, conference and meet-up audiences
previously
Guest lectures on taste, algorithms and design criticism
UX Glasgow — Designing for Gen Z and Designing for Government (first Gen Z speaker invited)
Sluggish podcast — Reclaiming Our Digital Lives
Talks run 20—30 minutes plus questions, remote or in person from Glasgow. All three can be cut to a 10-minute conference slot or extended into a workshop.