Boon Yew Chew

I've stopped (or paused) posting on Listed.to via Standard Notes. It hasn't worked out for me for various reasons, so I've moved all my articles to my personal site on boonyew.com and will continue posting updates there. ...

I'm in the process of finishing up some reflections from a FutureLearn course I took on service design... watch out for an update on that. And it's going to be published in conjunction with the Service Design Advent Calendar organised by Jason Mesut and Niclas Ljungberg — see the first post from Andy Polaine which has gone out just today! Interestingly, I've also contributed to a few other things in the last few months which I can't quite announce yet but I'm really excited to see when it launc...

It's been 2 years since I started improving up my home office setup to aid productivity and ergonomics. Just before the lockdown happened, I had decided to work from home more often. I was working with colleagues who were based in the US or Europe, so being in the office wasn't really necessary. But when COVID hit, work from home wasn't optional anymore. I started out with a not-too-large 120 x 60 cm IKEA table top and popped it on a height adjustable table frame, then added a decent monitor - ...

I've been comfortably working from home since lockdown started since I've never really needed to be in the office. My colleagues are based in different parts of the world, commuting sucks up too much time, and I'm more productive at home. Friday actually started out with as a plan to meet a friend up in the city at the closest major station to me, which wouldn't require me to go all the way to the centre. Then, Virgin Media alerted me of possible broadband disruptions. Then, my colleague Phylli...

I don’t do well with mindfulness apps. Actually, I don’t do very well with mindfulness exercises. I’ve learnt it, I’ve done it, I think it’s good, and I’ve benefit from them. I just can’t get into the habit of doing it. So instead, I’ve replaced it with Duolingo. It’s not the same thing, mindfulness and learning a new language… but it helps me keep my mind off things and distracts me in a way that gives me nourishment. I started using it heavily back when I was travelling to France and French-...

I just got back from the very first dad's night out: a pub meet of all the dads from our kids' class. It's a first-time-for-everything moment — the first time you decide to have a child, the first time you witness your child being born from your wife's womb, the first time your kid goes to school, and the first time the dads from all the kids in the same class agree to meet in a pub (for me, anyway). I met a lot of interesting people. A dad who works to address juvenile crime, a dad who deals ...

Lisa, one of our talented UX researchers on our team, organised a "discovery methods" learning session today. It was really refreshing to have everyone come together and go through the various approaches we've used in the past. There's no one right way to run a discovery, so it's always valuable to have a broad set of tools, and most importantly, lots of experience trying different things out to see what works. Sometimes coming back to old resources sheds new light on its meaning. One of the ar...

Today, I got hooked on Centaurworld, Netflix's new animated comedy series which appeared on my son's feed despite it being very oddly shaped next to Puffin Rock, Super Monsters, True & the Rainbow Kingdom and The Storybots (which I highly approve of). The mash up of war horse, centaurs, quests, silliness and songs shouldn't work, but it does. For me, anyway. And I don't even like watching TV. A hardened war horse transported away from battle finds herself in a land that's inhabited by s...

We just spent a few days in Eastbourne for a short break. It's by the beach, close to the local cliffs, has good restaurants and is more laid back than Brighton. There was an unfortunate situation with the hotel, where they re-assigned us to another hotel but in a smaller room so instead of staying together, our family of 3 had to split up into two separate rooms. Nonetheless, Eastbourne is still a worthy local trip. It costs half compared to going abroad, and is less complicated than flying a...

I’m learning to apply the not-immediately-obvious skill of unwinding. I’ve gotten really good at winding myself up for one reason or another, sometimes for very good reasons, but winding up needs to be unlearnt. It’s better than calling it mindfulness or meditation, I think. Unlearning winding up gets to the heart of the problem… that I wind myself up in the first place! It also helps to call my brain, body and feelings out as the 3rd person. It objectifies the things, and gives me a way of ...

I spent yesterday afternoon binge watching music videos from one my favourite bands: the Dodos, Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s West Coast duo. I somehow missed their amazing collaborations with Stargaze orchestra. The orchestra brings gorgeous depth to “Transformer” from their 2013 album, Carrier. They performed two other tracks, “Relief” and “Death” and are a joy to watch. For comparison, this is what the original video for Transformer looks and sounds like (the animated short is a bit d...

The sketchnote collection article I posted yesterday seemed to attract a lot of kudos from friends and contacts far and wide, equally reminding them of good past memories we all cherished. It seemed like this post was long overdue, but it's nice to give it a new lease of life out on active channels. It's been awhile since I've shared or posted anything related to Systems Thinking (on any channel, let alone this one). Today, I came across a fantastic case study article from Philippe Vandenbroe...

A short one today, because the long one is over on Medium.... yaah, I sort of cheated on the 100 day writing challenge. Anyway, the article that I posted live on Medium showcases a collection of sketchnotes I've produced over the years since 2010. If you're into that sort of thing, head over to the article here: https://boonych.medium.com/my-sketchnote-collection-from-all-the-years-2ace40559df3 ...

I'm contemplating making a trip back to the office, now that more of my colleagues are starting to work from there. But I really enjoy working from home and have to push myself in order to work from the office - there's a lot more prep I have to do: planning ahead for dinner, school runs, and such. There's also a bunch of stuff I forgot to collect and clean up before the lockdown hit, and I'm unsure where they are in the office now. I dread the idea of returning to the office to look for them —...

It's Monday and I've already lapsed 2 days on my 100 day writing challenge. Boo. Anyway, it was a good, busy weekend — I went up to Tower Bridge for the first time, and got to look down the glass floor to see the bridge open up from above. It was surprisingly uncrowded for a public attraction, and we had our lunch there with views overlooking East towards Canary Wharf. Then on Sunday, I cooked curry fish head for my uncles and aunts from my mum's side of the family and that was pretty mu...

This has been a busy, tiring week. My diary doesn't look crazy, there are no big deadlines... but I've been labouring over a competitor review document in the last few weeks, which sounds like such a silly thing to labour over. The last minute rush to set up the Miro boards for this month's internal guild discussion session added more intensity to my Thursday. And I was ambitious when I signed up for one too many sessions on mental health, which were running as part of an internal initiative. ...

I run a monthly-ish internal discussion forum for strategic UX topics at my workplace, building on things I've learnt from running IxDA London and other communities. Today, we covered the topic of copy and content, which came about when my colleague Olga, a technical writer, pinged me on Slack about something she thought might be a good fit for one of our monthly discussions. The initial thing wasn't copy or content-related but to cut the long-story short, we decided to host a discussion around...

I stumbled on a LinkedIn post of Mohamed Ali talking about his 100 day writing challenge which led me here. I've been so cautious and overthinking everything so much that I need some kind of reset, so I'm going to give Listed and Standard Notes a try and see where it goes, if it changes anything, or if I just get lazy and give up. Wherever it leads, who knows. But this is a first post, hopefully of many. If you want to track what I'm posting, please feel to Subscribe or come to https://listed.t...