Blog

In this blog, we introduce the Screen Space Defacer, an experimental browser extension that reimagines how users engage with the ad-saturated web. Rather than removing advertising, it transforms these commercial surfaces into sites of interaction, opening up new ways to think about attention, agency, and inhabiting digital space.

A weekly screen time number pretends to tell the truth about our digital lives—but it flattens everything into hours and quiet judgment. This piece explores a more interpretive alternative: treating screen time less like a metric and more like a reading.

Dog Man is a wildly popular series of kids’ comics about a half‑dog, half‑man police officer who fights crime in stories packed with bright cartoons, slapstick action and unashamed toilet humour. What sounds ridiculous on paper turns out to be brilliant for restless, easily distracted readers: short chapters, visual jokes, and DIY “flip‑book” style pages that turn reading into something you do with your whole body. After tearing through all 14 books with my son (laughing out loud far more than I’d like to admit) ranking them from “worst” to “best” felt like the only reasonable next step.

We rarely question the plants we use as metaphors for raising children. This blog argues that the famous orchid and dandelion framework, however well-intentioned, imports a (horti)cultural imagination that doesn't work in Aotearoa New Zealand, and asks too much of parents already living in the wind. Drawing on Aotearoa's own divaricating shrubs and a Te Ao Māori framework for understanding ADHD, it proposes mingimingi as a better image: a plant shaped by intensity, not rescued from it.

In debates about ‘normal’ screen time, we rarely ask who set the standard in the first place. This blog argues that our idea of healthy tech use is less a medical fact than a moving target set by our prevailing economic order, where too much and not enough screen time can both count as failure.

Reading Gabor Maté leads Alex to notice a recurring theme in popular psychology: ADHD and other cognitive differences are often cast as alien, almost Martian ways of being. This blog asks what happens when we stop treating those minds as broken Earthlings and start imagining a world built to sustain their atmosphere.

Alex reads Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and finds himself agreeing on the harms of “sticky” screens — but pushing back on bans, neurotypical assumptions, and the missing role of digital disconnection as a skill we all need to learn