Hi, I’m Simon.

Currently on a Sabbatical.

Past:

• Tik Tok Global Head of Monetization Integrity Services.

• Mastercard Director of Product Innovation.

• Head of AI and Data Platform Products at Zalando.

• PhD in Machine Learning for neonatal neuroscience.

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I build products and services at the intersection of design, data and AI.

I write about:

• AI products from idea to execution.

• Design fiction, Biophilia and possible futures.

• Progress and Possibilities.

In 2023, I published a fortnightly newsletter, Design Fictions: Biophilia Futures that offer glimpses of possible futures that bend towards Biophilia - the human tendency to be drawn towards life and life-like processes.

In 2020 and 2021, I published an occasional newsletter, The Deployment Age, that focused on tools from Design, UX of AI, Product Management, Futures, and Innovation Management broadly applicable to the knowledge work of creating new things.

I am the author of 500 Whys: Writing Your Purpose Statement, a short book written with the singular aim of illustrating a wide range of personal purpose statements so that others may more easily define theirs.

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I’m from Cork in Ireland and believe remote is the future of work.

Creativity is a muscle best grown under constraint. I take a photo a day with my phone. 1,000 posts and counting.

Book addict with a penchant for paper and pens.

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I write to organise my thinking. I publish to share that thinking with a fictional past self - what I wish I had read 6 months ago.

This tangle of topics is constantly evolving. Currently, my ‘favourite problems’ are:

• What is worth paying attention to? What should I automate? What should I ignore?

• How can I measurably, most effectively improve the lives of others?

• How might I repurpose my skills for good?

• How to balance exploration and exploitation in creative work and product development?

• How can I best educate my children to prepare for life in 2030s and beyond?

• How can we augment human intelligence and creativity with machines and systems? 

• What is worth automating and how best to build human-centred AI?

• What is not suited to automation and how can we best deliver great services?

• Is technology for social good, best deployed directly or indirectly?

• What ideas are worth investment and how to move them to delivery?

• How to create systems and spaces that maximise creative output?

• What can we learn about past invention and innovation to accelerate future growth?

• What are the best tools and systems for inventive problem-solving, idea generation, innovation and creativity?