Articles

In Defense of Lucky Underpants: making use of the placebo effect

Andrew Badham - 2018-06-01 10:51:37

The Placebo Effect is certainly one of life’s stranger quirks. The fact that you can take a sugar pill and feel better simply because you thought you would is strange to most of us, and yet, it gets stranger still. Apparently, even if you know you’re receiving a placebo, you will experience similar effects to if you had been deceived into thinking it was real. A research article published in December 2017 in the concisely named Journal, Pain, detailed this phenomenon. The research... Read more

How Nespresso Builds your Identity With Their Brand

Andrew Badham - 2018-05-17 17:38:26

About a year ago, friends bought my wife and me a belated wedding gift, a Nespresso machine. Being mildly addicted to caffeine, I was rather chuffed with our new toy and further chuffed with the voucher for free coffee pods that accompanied it. The voucher comes with every Nespresso purchase and it’s a damn clever promotion. You see, in order to claim the voucher, you have to go to the Nespresso store where you will get to fully experience their brand. You can’t purchase pods at a... Read more

Hate making calls? There's an app for that

Andrew Badham - 2018-05-10 15:54:42

Having to make phone calls is one of those chores that most people dread. Sure, there are the occasional folks who will pick up a phone way before they send an email, but theirs is a rare breed, and it’s growing rarer still. Most folks would rather hash out an essay-length text than simply chat to the person on the other side of the line. The trouble for these folks is that you often have to pick up a phone. Whether it’s because you need a response as soon as possible, the person... Read more

The what and the why of UX Design

Andrew Badham - 2018-04-23 12:28:16

On a superficial level, User Experience Design is a fairly self-explanatory function. A UX Designer is primarily concerned with how the user interacts with a product. What that product is, varies; it could be a web, mobile or desktop app, or even a physical product. Regardless, someone has to take into account how the user will eventually use the product and whether that design actually fits their usage. That’s all fairly intuitive from the title; what’s less intuitive is how UX de... Read more

Devil's Advocate

Andrew Badham - 2018-04-17 13:55:09

There’s a game I like to play with my classes. It’s based on the concept of playing Devil’s Advocate. Simply put, it’s all about taking the opposing view of an argument even if you don’t really agree with it. First off, we try to find a couple of controversial topics, ones that really split the room, but hopefully, don’t elicit too much of an emotional response. A little bit of controversy ups the engagement level, but too much spirals the class into emotio... Read more

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