Product

The first Kói Creative photography collection to go on general sale is now available as a limited edition photozine, stocked in Unitom (Stevenson Square, Manchester).

By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort. Instead, I went out looking for more.

It’s just before two in the afternoon. I’m sat in the back room of a pub in Liverpool, John Lennon staring down at me from the wall, expression equal parts disinterest and derision. Unsurprising, given I’ve just placed a Kodak from 1996 on the saloon bar table. There’s no point taking any pictures in here, it’s too dark and I’m using a roll of Fujifilm that expired 20 years ago. Old film stock is unpredictable, so better not waste the shots in badly lit rooms.

GenAI has permeated everyday life. The go-to answer for millions of people faced with any number of different tasks. So why does it have such a basic monochrome interface? Open a browser or app for any of the mainstream GenAIs, and you’ll be faced with some variation of a black page with a box for entering white text into. You can turn the mic on, upload a file or image, but those are ultimately context-driven sideshows. The text box is the start-point for almost all GenAI w

"Praxis is the idea that you do something cos you want to do it. And after you've done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it." Tony Wilson said that in 1984, sitting in a bathtub in south Manchester, trying to explain Factory Records to anyone listening. It sounds romantic. It sounds like permission to follow your gut and figure it out later. But that's a misreading.

On Side 1 of Television’s 1977 LP ‘Marquee Moon’, you’ll hear Tom Verlaine sneer: “How does a snake get out its skin? Here's a depiction…” The answer is of course ‘Friction’, as the song title has already given away. Use that F word in a tech environment though and people recoil in horror. There are very few concepts more repulsive to a UX designer or Product manager than that of friction. Metrics are dedicated to the elimination of friction in all its unseemly forms.

There's a particular kind of strategic paralysis that sets in when someone from the board - or a consultant, or a competitor's press release - tells you that digital transformation is coming for your category. You need to create a Luxury Digital strategy. The room gets serious. Roadmaps get built. Budget conversations start. And at some point, probably within eighteen months, you're affixing a fitness tracker to the Milanese-mesh bracelet of a 6-grand watch and calling it inn

Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n

Every collecting market eventually produces the same short list of things everyone agrees are worth owning. That list is not arbitrary. It is the output of mimetic desire, corporate portfolio management, and an algorithm that rewards thumbnail legibility over depth. Understanding how the list forms does not mean rejecting it. It does mean you can decide whether you are on the list because you chose to be, or because nobody told you there was a choice.

Rubens designed the major works, established the compositional framework, and reviewed his apprentices' execution. Van Dyck eventually forked the codebase, established his own studio, and surpassed Rubens in the field he chose. Git, the version control system underpinning most of the world's software, formalises exactly this: a master repository, branches, independent lines of work, the ability to merge or to diverge permanently.

For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.