Orientation
I work on how people learn — in rooms, on screens, and around a table.
I work on the user experience of Singapore’s Student Learning Space, at the Educational Technology Division. Before that I taught geography for 10 years and helped run a secondary school. What holds it together is an interest in how designed structure — a room, an interface, a set of rules — shapes what people are able to think and do. Away from work I play games with deep structure, for the same reason.
shapes possibility
How I work
Five commitments
01
Start with learning, not the furniture
Design begins with educational intent, activity, and interaction — not layouts, products, or platforms.
02
Make complexity legible
Diagrams over decoration. If a framework cannot be drawn, it is probably not yet a framework.
03
Novelty is not evidence
Immersion, interactivity, and AI are chosen for the learning action they enable, never for presence or newness.
04
Design for translation
Research is unfinished until it becomes a principle, a tool, and then a changed practice. The last step is the hard one.
05
Play seriously
The games I return to have deep structure and short rules. They are the cleanest lesson available in how constraint produces thought.
What I’m building
Three ways of thinking that belong in the same hand.
Futuring, complexity, and ways of thinking are usually taught separately, by different people, to different audiences, using incompatible vocabulary. That is a problem, because the situations educators face need all three at once. I am working on bringing them together into one coherent toolkit — few enough moves to be learnable, structured enough to be teachable, and honest about where each way of thinking stops being useful.
Read the toolkit§02 — Professional
Notes on practice
Generalised arguments, written from experience without disclosing it. Each one ends on what transfers — that beat is why the page exists.
§03 — Personal
Things I do for their own sake
Not hobbies in the sense of filling time. They are where I get to be a beginner, and where the feedback is immediate and unsentimental. Most of what I believe about designed experience I first learned at a table, losing.
Mahjong
Singapore mahjong is a scoring system pretending to be a tile game. A game held together almost entirely by undocumented convention is a small, complete study in tacit knowledge — and a decent argument for why documentation is design work.
mahjong.geraldajam.comContract bridge
The best-designed information problem I know of that you can finish in an evening. Bidding is a constrained language — a small set of legal utterances, all public, all ambiguous — and both partners have to build a shared picture using only those, while two opponents listen in.
Cartoons
A single panel has to carry setup, character, and turn simultaneously, which makes it the most unforgiving compression problem in visual communication — and the closest thing I know to a diagram with a sense of humour.
Trying new tech
I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them, on the theory that you cannot evaluate a tool from its documentation. Most attempts do not survive, which is the point — the fast, cheap failure is the finding.
The name
Two halves of one practice
This site is built on a design system I call Atlas & Loom. The name is not decoration. The two halves are the two halves of how I actually work, and the whole site is coloured by them — blue for the map, orange for the thread.
Atlas
Maps · terrain · contours · scale
I trained as a geography educator, and it remains the most useful thing about me. Geography teaches you to read a place — to treat terrain, scale, and interdependence as causes rather than background. It is why I start with the room and not the furniture, and why I think a learning space is already an argument about what people are allowed to do in it.
Loom
Weaving · networks · threads
The other half is what I am building now. Complexity, systems, and making are all about how things hold together — and about how a change in one thread turns up somewhere nobody was looking. That is the toolkit: futuring, complexity, and ways of thinking, braided tightly enough that a school team can pick the whole thing up at once.
A map shows you the terrain. A loom shows you what it is made of, and what moves when you pull one thread. The work I find interesting needs both — and so, it turns out, do the games.
§04 — Curation
From the library
What I’d hand you if you asked. Nothing is here because it is famous, every entry carries one line in my own words, and every shelf names its best door in.
Learning science
Every other shelf here assumes an answer to how people learn. This one makes that answer explicit, so the rest can be argued with.
Learning spaces
Because the room is already making decisions about who can speak and who can be seen, and most briefs treat it as an empty container.
Educational technology
Every generation of technology arrives certain it is different. This shelf is the record of the previous ones saying the same thing.
Maker education
Because building something is the fastest way to discover what you actually understand, and the slowest thing to argue for in a curriculum meeting.
Complexity education
Because schools are not machines with broken parts, and almost every improvement plan is written as though they are.
Design thinking
It is the method I was schooled in and the one I am most wary of, because it is easy to run the workshop and skip the thinking.