Blog | Greg Walsh - Design Researcher

The Loss of Future Nostalgia for modern Connected Toys

April 24, 2026

When I was cleaning out my basement, I found my talking Ed Grimley doll, a very old toy from the 80s with a pull string. When you pull the string, it says something that Martin Short’s character would say like “I’m totally mental I must say!”. Today, thirty-some years later, it still works. It talks a little fast, but overall it works. The same goes for my Talking Buzz Lightyear from 1995. It’s actually fully functional thirty-one years later. This made me think about the connected toys my kids have had: those toys that use the internet, an app, or some type of forced login in order to deliver their full value.

AI is the Team You Can't Afford to Hire

April 7, 2026

There’s a big problem with the way that I see people use AI in their design work. A lot of times people treat AI as an answering machine, meaning you ask it a question or you tell it to do something and it just gives you something back. I have seen student designers overly rely on it. I’ve seen student designers dismiss it entirely. I have seen professional designers over-rely as well as dismiss it. In reality, neither side of that spectrum is useful to understanding how AI can help in a design practice.

Exporting Content from Publii to Jekyll (or any Flat-file CMS)

March 26, 2026

Updated 3/2026

In this tutorial, we’ll export Publii data and put it into basic Markdown for use in Jekyll (or any flat file CMS like Hugo).

About a year ago, I stopped using my home grown blog engine and switched to using Publii. I’ve been relatively happy with that tool but found limitations that blocked me:

local install made it difficult using it on multiple machines
lack of hooks to create my own writing tools, for example, on the go
no support for mobile
SFTP just didn’t work when I switched servers and required a ssh key.

I tried Grav but my server’s file permissions didn’t want to work with it. I considered going back to my own software but decided to try Jekyll. Jekyll is a flat CMS that uses markdown and renders it to a simple HTML site.