Contemplations & Consumptions: Vol 4

Contemplations

Bookmark Project Highlights

• Kerry Davies and Mary Phillip, who are two of the pioneering Black Lionesses featured on the bookmarks, emailed me to express their gratitude for the work I had done and requested bookmarks for themselves and their loved ones. Kerry stumbled upon the bookmark project while browsing the web in relation to Black History Month. It was an honour to send the bookmarks to these remarkable women. This stands out as a significant achievement for me, considering the time, effort, and finances I invested in the Black Lionesses project.

• A mutual acquaintance connected me with Councillor Vanessa Boateng of Knowsley Town Council in Liverpool. She expressed interest in obtaining some bookmarks for a Black History Month event at the town council later in October. I removed the Kent Libraries content and logo and replaced them with Knowsley Town’s own, creating a personalised Black Lionesses bookmark for her event. It was a great opportunity to expand the reach of the bookmarks.

• I was invited to exhibit the Black Lionesses’ bookmarks at a London FA + Football Beyond Borders event to celebrate Black History Month. The event took place at Wembley Stadium, and it was my first time visiting the stadium. Despite the rain showers, it was an enjoyable event. I had the opportunity to discuss the bookmark project and my previous football projects with event attendees.

Read more about the Black Lionesses bookmark project here.

Freelancing

I am still actively seeking freelance user research work. If you or your organisation have any upcoming projects that could benefit from my skills, please do not hesitate to reach out. I would love to learn more and explore how I can contribute. You can also check out my LinkedIn profile here.

Consumptions

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The Continental – This three-episode limited series serves as a prequel to the John Wick film series. It delves into the origin story of Winston and Charon, set in the 1970s, and explores how Winston came to be the proprietor of the Continental Hotel. I personally enjoyed it, even though I’m aware it received mixed reviews. The series incorporates similar action sequences from the John Wick franchise. it was refreshing to see a diverse cast, particularly strong diverse female characters.

The series also employs a storytelling technique reminiscent of “Breaking Bad,” where a scene is introduced at the beginning of the episode, whether it’s a flashback or flash-forward, seemingly unrelated to the immediate scenes. However, the significance becomes clear by the end of the episode, adding depth to the narrative. As a fun fact, it’s revealed that Charon hails originally from Nigeria.

Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul – This four-episode limited series on Netflix, which explores the rise and fall of Juul, will interest product development nerds. It chronicles the journey of two Stanford graduates who initially created a vaping product with noble intentions but witnessed its corruption due to pressure from investors focused on growth and profit.

Juul, an e-cigarette product, was originally conceived to provide smokers with an alternative to traditional cigarettes. It was so slickly designed that it earned the tag “the iPhone of e-cigarettes.” However, a company established to disrupt the tobacco industry eventually adopted similar youthful lifestyle marketing tactics and secured substantial investments from Big Tobacco.

Ultimately, Juul was a nicotine company masquerading as a tech company, reminiscent of the trajectory of WeWork in the real estate sector. Both companies achieved high market valuations assigned to tech companies, only to crash and burn.

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Game of Edges – I’m a passionate fan of books on sports analytics, so I couldn’t resist picking up “Game of Edges” when I spotted it in the bookshop. A strength of this book is its coverage of analytics across various sports, including basketball, baseball, football, and American football. Many books in this genre tend to concentrate on one specific sport. While I was already familiar with several of the case studies, particularly those from the world of baseball and football, I was delighted to discover some new insights from basketball and American football.

Sports teams employ data analytics to identify inefficiencies within the industry to gain a competitive edge over their rivals. It has evolved into an arms race to secure the most brilliant data scientists who can create models harnessing the power of machine learning to interpret the data.

Schoenfeld contends that a negative consequence of this arms race is the erosion of sports as an entertainment spectacle for fans, as coaching and organisational decision-making become overly reliant on statistical models.