WEC Articles

The Power of Boredom Boredom often gets a bad rap, but research shows it can be truly beneficial, fueling creativity, original thinking, and even mental wellbeing. When there are no distractions, our minds start to wander, giving us the chance to daydream and invent new solutions. Many real-world examples show just how powerful boredom can be. For instance, Chef George Crum invented potato chips after a boring moment and playful experimentation with sliced potatoes. Similarly, Art Fry created Post-it Notes because he was bored and needed a better way to keep paper in place, an idea sparked during a dull church service. Even the magical world of Harry Potter wouldn’t exist if J.K. Rowling hadn’t allowed her mind to drift while stuck on a delayed train. Studies have found that people who engage in boring tasks, like sorting beans by color, later perform better in creative idea-generation challenges than those busily occupied the whole time. Psychologists explain that boredom helps us dev...

Australia’s Evolving Relationship with Aboriginal Culture Australia’s relationship with its First Nations peoples is complex, layered, and still unfolding. For much of its modern history, Aboriginal culture was not only ignored—it was actively suppressed. But today, it's increasingly common to hear Australians begin events or speeches with an Acknowledgment of Country, paying respect to the traditional custodians of the land. This shift didn’t happen overnight. It is the result of generations of activism, public reckoning, and cultural change. In this post, we’ll look at how Australia got here—from the era of the White Australia policy to a society beginning to embrace its Indigenous heritage—and explore both the progress made and the challenges that remain. A Brief Historical Context Before British colonisation began in 1788, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived across the Australian continent for over 60,000 years, maintaining rich and diverse cultures deeply conne...

Tariffs: A Look at Their History, Use, and Impact on the Global Economy Tariffs are one of the oldest tools in international trade, yet they remain a hot topic in today’s global economy. Whether in discussions about trade wars, local industry protection, or rising prices for everyday goods, tariffs continue to shape economies and influence the way countries interact. But what exactly are tariffs, and why do governments use them? More importantly, how do they affect us today? helped protect Japanese farmers from cheaper foreign rice. While this supports domestic agriculture, it also means that Japanese consumers pay higher prices for imported food products. Similarly, the European Union has placed tariffs on steel and aluminum to protect its manufacturing sector from foreign competition, ensuring that local producers remain competitive in the market. For consumers, tariffs often mean higher prices. When a country imposes tariffs on imported goods, companies usually pass the extra cost o...

  The only constant Reflections on the authorship of design artefacts that live a life beyond the hands of those who craft them. Several years ago a fellow UX designer was explaining to me how disappointing he found the transient nature of the designs we put out into the (digital) world. The interfaces and interactions we ‘sketch’ and ‘paint’ are no sooner ‘built’ and ‘published’ than we (or another designer) are redesigning them. Isn’t the term ‘digital product’ designer somewhat of an oxymoron? Can the intangible claim to have been  produced ? The digital world exists outside of time and design portfolios grasp at legacies the present cannot access. All that remains are screenshots—the spectres of former endeavours. Though dissolution is an intractable truth of everything (bar the metaphysical), it’s hard to imagine much in the modern physical world that experiences the pace of continual overpainting and reinvention of digital ephemera. Like parchment, the web is a palimpses...