Hello again. We made it to the difficult second album! The critics won’t think this is as good as the old stuff.
It’s mental health awareness month and coincidentally I’ve been involved in a few conversations of late about the negative effects that working from home is having on some people’s mental health. I love remote working and don’t want to go back to the office full-time any time soon, but I’m definitely starting to sense negative effects on the mental health of myself and others. It turns out sitting with your own thoughts for too long, and communicating too much over text ‘chat’ really isn’t that healthy. How Remote Work Can Impact Employees' Mental Health explores some of the psychological benefits and challenges of remote work, and Here’s What We Do and Don’t Know About the Effects of Remote Work is an interesting read, based on data gathered from economists, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars, regarding remote work since the pandemic.
While we’re on the subject of workplaces and things like mental health, inclusive teams and psychological safety, this article about the Government Digital Service posters listing what’s ok for new starters is just lovely.
My interest and investigations into AI continue. Here’s a nice list of the Top AI Resources You Must Follow If You Are Into AI that I found.
There’s plenty being written about the benefits of AI and it’s no surprise that Generative AI provides significant boost to knowledge workers, though it’s interesting to note the caution on over-reliance in this article, and the reference to a ‘jagged frontier’ where tasks that appear to be of similar difficulty can actually be performed worse by humans using AI.
A colleague from work recently shared a bunch of academic papers and articles about the risks and ethics of AI like The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism and more worryingly Squiggle Maximizer (formerly "Paperclip maximizer") which considers a thought experiment showing how an artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity.
Mobile first has long been considered the right approach to design for the modern web, but an article from the revered Nielsen Norman Group suggests there might be unintended, negative usability impacts to desktop experiences from designing with a mobile-first approach. Personally I don’t blame mobile first for this but rather lazy design and front-end coding. There are ways around ‘content dispersion’ if breakpoints are employed to render a better desktop layout.
Oh, and The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore and We’re turning designers into factory workers.
In music news, I learnt this week that Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads is actually a cover of a song written by an Australian, Tom Morgan, from a band called Smudge. Apparently Evan Dando used to spend a lot of time in Australia, co-writing with Tom Morgan. Who knew?
And this Billy Bragg interview with Adam Buxton is brilliant. Billy also wrote a great article on The Voice referendum…
It’s funny how themes start to appear for these without consciously trying. This edition seems to have emerged as a view on unintended outcomes and consequences. I hope you enjoyed it.
Until the next one.
I love that poster too!