Events | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

SheSays Brighton International Women's Day

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:00:00 +0000

I was honoured to be invited to talk at SheSays Brighton for International Women’s Day 2026.

Photo by Harmony Kinnear, used with permission.

Note

Text shown on the slide above:
Flex your brain & your muscles.
Minimise waste, includes time.
Look after nature & people.
Everyone and everything = interesting.
Move with intention & fix things.
The right path ususally feels uncomfortable.

LTUX Brighton presents, Talk UX: Redesigning Place

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:30:00 +0000

In 2025, LTUX Brighton hosted the international conference for , .

Talk UX Stats

188 attendees over 2 days | 151 in-person and 37 online
20 talks
5 workshops
3 short film screenings
1 panel discussion
£201 raised for local charity, .

Personal Reflection

Personally, Talk UX was one of the most challenging, yet fulfilling experiences of my life. It really warrants it’s own blog post, particularly because we tried to make the event as responsible and sustainable as we could. As organisers we considered this in terms of how we organised, resourcing (both in-person and digital), and environmental impact.

I grew both in so many ways as a person, as a designer, as a leader, and as a business leader through the experience. I will be forever thankful for the vision, belief, and trust or our organising group and everything we achieved together.

This marked the end of my chapter leadership of LTUX Brighton. I’m staying on as treasurer as we move into next phase of our development as a group.

Photo by Laura Rodriguez
Left-to-right: Inka Howorth, Fiona MacNeill, Heidi Swigon, Lou Carroll, Alex Woodward, Emily Clark, Deeksha Bhushan, Alice Umeji.

**A huge thank you to Quiet Down There for their collaboration. Although we were only able to make a small donation this time, we hope to be able to do more in the future. Our goal was to help raise awareness about the amazing work they do to address hygiene poverty and we successfully did that with Talk UX and through our social media posts.

Green Software Practitioner Study Day at Sussex Innovation Centre

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000

This event follows on from my .

I conceived Green Practitioner Study Day as a collaboration between LTUX Brighton and Green Software Brighton. Having previously collaborated on an amazing hackathon in 2024, we knew this could work well.

The idea for the event came to me during a Green Software Brighton meetup evening. Folks at the event mentioned completing the Green Software Foundation and The Linux Foundation’s Green Software Practitioner certificate which is a free self-study module now available on the .

I too wanted to complete the certificate, but I found myself wondering if others encountered the same issues I did when it comes to self-paced online learning.

Time: it wasn’t that the motivation wasn’t there, but as a small business owner the time wasn’t.
Relevance: in tech noone is an island, we are part of interdisciplinary teams. It seemed to me that the power of this learning could only be unlocked through collaboration.
Momentum: on that point driving forward sustainability needs multiple champions to gain traction. As a contractor I needed other folks’ stories to help understand what more I could be doing.
Journeys: I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone and that others were also encountering the same barriers that I was. We are on this journey together!

All of this, I felt called for an in-person experience, by tech folks for tech folks. Where the time was reserved and structured to allow for the completion of the certificate and interdisciplinary disucssion. So, I set about creating an interest page as an experiment, were other people interested in such a day?

I thought that I would get maybe 12 people to attend. To my surprise, we sold out 27 spaces with a healthy waiting list. We were also given a grant from Brighton & Hove Buses to help defray the costs of the event and provide some free spaces for students and those on limited incomes.

What an attendee said:

…being able to be in a friendly location with a group of people interested in the same subject matter especially was incredibly, encouraging and helped a lot…I would’ve otherwise just spoke about it for ages but not actually managed to execute.

Will you join us at the next Green Practitioner Study Day?

I have a longer blog post that I need to write about the sustainability of the Study Day itself (it truly was a sustainable workshop!).

There are two further events planned in 2026.

Friday, 30th January at WRAP (next to Brighton Station). Details and tickets at the .
Friday, 13th March at Plus X. Details and tickets are coming soon.

Pledge cards from the end of the event - using the mini-reusable whiteboards that I created for the Study Day which have now become a fixture at almost all my workshops. The three cards read, “Start doing: At 1st stage, consider carbon impact of anythng I work on; Keep doing: expanding my knowledge, learn ways to improve practice; Stop doing: being thoughtless about consumption. Thank you to Deeksha Bhushan for giving me permission to use this photo.

The quest for a sustainable workshop on sustainability at Green Software Brighton

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:30:00 +0000

A lightning talk where I reflected on digital sustainability and the irony that workshops designed to unlock our thinking tend to consume vast amounts of single use and non-recyclable materials. I asked the question, “how we can truly envision the future when we keep using the same old tools?”.

You can access the .

Short talk, long thinking

As is often the case with my talks, although the talk was short and thankfully kept to time, the thinking was long and deep.

My thinking for this talk was heavily influenced by attending the short course at the Royal College of Art in July 2025. During the course, I learned about signals, horizon scanning, and facilitating workshops to help envision regenerative futures. Such ‘futures’ may be beyond our usual ‘workshop’ thinking, which can be encumbered by structural barriers, financial limitations, and to a certain extent fear of the unknown.

I cannot fault the delivery of the course, which was incredible, thoughtful, and thoroughly researched. However, attending uncovered some ethical questions for me about the position and priviledge of designers who have financial and socio-political power to envision the ‘future’ and tell the stories of the future. A future which they may or may not be part of based on recent shifts in the tech sector and a future that still reflects the troubling power dynamics we see today.

This uneasy feeling was further heightened after attending an amazing talk by about his book, . I got to chat with Dan after his talk, and it was one of the best disucssions of my life. Needless to say, as an amateur art historian, this book is very much on my to-read list.

So, on a meta level, personally I was troubled by aspects of what is sometimes called ‘speculative design’ or ‘futures’. In these situations, were we as designers colonising the future? Would it be best to reimagine power first before reimaging action, or output? Or do we need to uncover tangible future objects as power is fleeting, too difficult, or perhaps too downright depressing? I couldn’t shake the feeling that we ‘futurists’ are rogue archaeologists and like the archaeologists of yore we engineered meaning based on limited understanding, empathy, and exploration of the descendent cultures near the ‘dig site’. At a micro level I also observed how many single use paper products it took us to explore these ideas. These dilemmas are my own and I continue to explore my thoughts through my design and art practices.

So this talk set out a series of commitments, which I then beta tested during the Green Software Practitioner Study Day in August 2025. I then successfully reused resources I created (mini-whiteboard cards) at work-related workshops in October 2025. However, there is a level of irony that when running a full on ‘futures’ workshop for the first time in December, I used more paper than ever! This was due to the scale of the event and unknown Wi-Fi connectivity. So, it is all a ‘work-in-progress’.

What I will say is the December event with the ‘futures’ workshop took an approach, informed by and . Exploring 5 years into the future, we created imaginary artefacts, but very much through the lens of our issues today and this felt like an inclusive, effective, yet non-invasive approach to ‘Futures’. As is often the case, I need time and practice to figure things out of my own and draw upon a range of influences and inspirations.

I end by posing a question:

What if the things that we need for the future need to be both remembered and imagined?

An example of this was these fantastic fish traps from the UK about 200 years ago which I saw at the More than Human exhibit at the Design Museum in August 2025 (from the Pitt Rivers Museum collection). These beautifully crafted objects were designed to catch only mature fish, letting young fish go free to minimise harm to fish populations.

We knew how to live with and design for our environment, but we have willfully forgotten.

Two panel discussions at EVOLVE [25]

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000

I had the honour of being part of first ever “EVOLVE [25]” a new premier tech conference for Brighton & Hove and Sussex. I was part of two panel discussions for the event.

I wrote a blog post about my perspectives and experiences at the event which you can read on the . The post has a particularly brilliant action shot of me, so is worth checking out to see that alone!

Panel 1 @ 2.30pm

Sustainable Development from the Inside Out: Driving Change Within Tech Teams

How tech teams and individuals, not just leadership, are embedding sustainability into their workflows, culture and everyday decisions.

Chair: Ed Chinn.
Fellow panellists: Mark Buss, Neil Clark, Catrina Baker-Bassett

I loved getting to know my fellow panellists, particularly our chair Ed Chinn whom I met for the first time. I look forward to future collaborations with these folks–forging new connection was core to the ethos of . It was such a special day!

Panel 2 @ 3.50pm

Building Sustainably as a Digital Product Team

As panel chair, in assembling the discussion I took inspiration from the new –“Minimise environmental impact”.

Chair: Fiona MacNeill
Panellists: Heidi Swigon - Content Strategist, Will Barnes - SEO, Oliver Winks - Developer, Eliana Zuluaga - UX, University of Brighton Student, Viraj Panickar - UX, University of Brighton Student, Louis Radtke - UX, University of Brighton Student, Vishnu Vijayan - UX, University of Brighton Student

I invited the panellists to think about

the entire product lifecycle
their place in that professionally or a role they aspire to in the future
what they can practically do in their role to make change
drawing on their past experiences, wither thrhough work or learning in their responses

You can check out the - including the full set of Ecómon cards.

Inspirations: Fantasy Football and Pokémon

Steve Rackley, one of the organisers, gave me the challenge of considering how students could be involved in the conference. As an ethusiastic alumni of University of Brighton, I was eager to take up this challenge and involve current students from the MSc User Experience Design I completed back in 2018. This was an amazing experience and allowed me to be in contact with students who had interviewed me about digital sustainability for one of their coursework projects.

As we had quite a large panel and needed to represent a number of specialisms, the challenge for me as chair was to make sure that folks had fairly distributed time ‘on air’ during the panel. My solutions to this problem were, to keep introductions to a minimum by co-creating Ecómon cards for each panellist, to take a fantasy football inpired approach as in what would each role in a ‘dream’ sustainable product team do? I also used a yellow card / red card system which fit this scenario - more on this below.

The Ecómon trading cards, shown above, gave us a shorthand and lighthearted way of introducing each speaker, including their specialisms they goals and for the students, their professional aspirations.

The yellow card / red card system was used to politely draw down particularly passionate speakers who were using too much air time (I am definitely guilty of this myself).

The panel went well and although we were right at the end of the day, we still had a great crowd.

I have taken learning from this panel into my professional work as an interim product manager for a startup. This also initiaed a passionate side quest to support the development of sustainable product teams throughout sussex through running and volunteering for . More on these aspects in future event posts and blog posts!

Will I see you EVOLVE [26]?

I sure hope so, and in 2026 they are scaling up by holding the event at Brighton Centre. Lets make EVOLVE [26] massive by coming together to celebrate the fantastic digital community that we have here in Sussex!

Gr8 Expectations - A generative game about AI at Clearleft's Service Design Breakfast

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Some of the hand-drawn cards used to enable and stimulate discussion.

Creating Another Way (CAW) at UX Camp Brighton 2025

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

I’m planning a series of blog posts about this talk as there is a lot of thinking behind ‘Creating Another Way’. It is a longterm work-in-progress! If you are wondering about Obsidian, find out more about their . I am a long-term fan.

So you want to go green? at Green SEO Brighton

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:30:00 +0000

A joint presentation with Kathryn Lawrence (Behavioural Scientist and Researcher).

Games for design and thinking at University of Brighton

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Student sociey run led by Jennifer Udenze, Kirti Kumar, and Jordan Rocha. This was a great day and it was superb to be invited to play reflective gam, ‘ ’. During the day I showed a range of design focused cards, including .

Showing Smithery's Regenerative Design Toolkit as an example of a design game to a group of students

Dialogue: community, volunteering, and setting up your own company at University of Brighton

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The UX of Self-Defence at LTUX Brighton

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:30:00 +0000

Learning is embodied and most effective when linked to sensory and emotional experiences. Sensory experiences and emotional reactions build neural pathways. Find out what Fiona has learned by completing 56,160 minutes of Kickboxing at the time of writing the talk.

Put the learning into work; take the work out of learning at Playful Learning 2024

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Research Hacking at UX Camp Brighton 2024

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Literature review

Starter template for creating a Microsoft List from an Excel sheet:
Template with the ‘CONCATENATE’ formula for creating formatted references based on a table in Excel:
Template for formatting the references in Microsoft Word:

Creating truly accessible forms at SD in Gov (Virtual)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:30:00 +0000