Tom Smith

Tom worked with me in Ultralab in the nineties, bringing a multi-disciplinary no-nonsense approach to design. He had particular talents to create original visual material, understand visual design and 'get' a bigger picture of what it all means.

2007 Tom Smith.jpg

Reflection: I learnt to see through surface meaning and understand the motives and forces that shaped people's behaviour through discussions with Tom.

Tom joined Ultralab as a volunteer after reading about us in a magazine and realising we were just over the road! His determination to create complex and powerful server software mixed with his clarity about design issues inspired me to do the same. We shared much analytical thinking to make sense of the online, multimedia, interactive and participative opportunities that burgeoned in the mid-nineties.

(Words: 137 )

Lewis Carroll describes a fictional map that had:

"the scale of a mile to the mile."

A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that:

"we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
— Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll, 1893