The Long Question

Before it was a mission, it was a working question on live projects: could an application adapt to a person's situation — their time, place, history, intent — instead of treating everyone identically? Everything since has been an attempt to answer it.

A Decade of Pursuing Context — My Path to Building Smarter Customer Experiences.

The question got tested in production: contextual, cloud-native consumer systems for retail and the high street, built on AWS and Google Cloud. StreetShops and a decade of client delivery were the groundwork — human-context systems shipped to real users, long before the theory had a name.

Retail: A New Era of Consumer Apps using Cloud — 2017

Chatbots with AWS Next Generation Cloud Services — 2017

High Street in crisis, we can help revive it — 2020

The Cloud is normal, what's next? — 2021

Customer experiences for Retail on Google Cloud — 2021

StreetShops — streetshops.co.uk — 2021

One idea kept surfacing in the applied work: tools should wait to be consulted, not push themselves into our attention. "Planet of the phones" named it in 2021 — let people pull information when they're ready, within their own context. That critique hardened into an explicit mission. Dolo began in 2022; The Human Half started working out the theory underneath it.

Planet of the phones — 2021

Real-world usage scenarios — 2022

The mission now runs across five connected properties — a working platform, a theory series, an academic journal, a fiction project, and a cultural-criticism lens. Different registers, one thesis: human-AI symbiosis in service of mutual aid. The applied thread continues too, most recently in enterprise contextual and agentic AI.