Charlie Gedeon

One marker that I’m seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that I’m further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical.

How can we know whether a conceptual metaphor is doing what we want of it? What features do good alternative conceptual metaphors have in common? How can we successfully dismantle the foundational metaphor of a concept? Some harmful metaphors will be harder to free ourselves from than others; however, the most important first step is to be aware... See more

I used to value myself based on how fast I was learning and the breadth of the ground I was covering. This was a way to escape my own perfectionism — which caught up to me as soon as I started focusing on only one thing. I’m learning it’s a skill to sit with your mistakes, ask for help, and move slower and more deliberately.

A tradeoff occurs every time you get feedback. You become slightly more mainstream, slightly more aligned with the zeitgeist. You become marginally more of an exploiter than an explorer , standing on the shoulders of the giants who conceived the paradigm you’re striving to build upon. This is very effective when you want to align your work with... See more

Bad UX research does not stink. Anyone without training can create poor research and the output looks just as convincing to the untrained eye. This is the reason why UX research uniquely feels the push for democratization.

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

Smallwood learned that unhappy minds tend to wander in the past, while happy minds often ponder the future.