How To Break Anything

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27 Jan 2012

from: "The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg"
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"...Maybe this sensation is why, in the past few years, there has been a resurgence of artisanal analog technology"

[no maybe about it - culture is reactive]

"It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective, and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible, more linear and more contextual."

[yep; there's always culture to react to. "Nostalgia" is just what we use to characterize its artifacts]

via nytimes.com
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23 Jan 2012

The easiest way to solve any problem is to organize it.
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via youtube.com

A few days ago I had been thinking on a complex problem, and it struck me that the easiest way to solve any problem is to first organize it.

It's not really that profound of a thought; really it just comes from my background as a trends consultant, since trends consulting is basically just a process of organizing information. It was back then that I started to realize that in many ways my primary talent in life, in many various facets, is simply: organization.

But the thought struck me deeply because I realized this has been my approach for as long as I could remember.

I instantly flashed back to being young - elementary school - finding it odd that people thought I was smart at least because I was so good at math. (Arithmetic didn't seem like something that should be hard, so it struck me as odd that people would use it to judge how smart I was.) In a way that I can only say in retrospect, arithmetic was supremely natural to me, because numbers are so easy to organize. One popular commenter on the video above feels like something I may have even tried to tell a classmate once upon a time: "You just shuffle numbers to make easiest, fastest way to process."

That strange feeling just kind of went away to the background of subconsciousness for a long long time.

And then I saw the above video.

It really hammers in the point that the "organization" philosophy is simply this:

To reality and the universe, information is the same no matter how it's presented - so organization can indeed seem superfluous. But presenting it in certain ways can make information mean different things to *humans*, and that is all the difference.
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20 Jan 2012

"Movies reimagined for another time & place"
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<img style="margin-top:-395px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/61fe905b73903dc5ce28782c0977754d.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-360px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/aaf845d1edfc0b13a404edf5b7625afa.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-654px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/7f893bc915f72fef7b1d2aff61e402d0.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-648px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/59fcb0e56adb05e8d0eec22f42ce1253.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-611px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/1a4b0395fc1505b907be5f708c6cbebb.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-401px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/5b34939436c0b72d3c09a681c05d673a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-481px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/328b510a8d6e1769715b92cf8c1ed5d4.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-565px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/09f6e2b5373c35a6cfa714a617d8aa0a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-397px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/9d8c544152dcc7a03aee3ee4ddd4f42a.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-442px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/10354579aea888837d3dd1345d5a7645.png" />

<img style="margin-top:-402px;" src="http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles24/832885/projects/2783319/5282ccadd6f9888f0f57160a578665a0.png" />

via behance.net

Quite a brilliant blending of varied cultural narratives across an array of levels. Beautifully complex blends of (at very least):
1) the narrative captured in the stories themselves
2) the narratives we construct around the individual actors and directors
3) the cultural eras associated with both of the above
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17 Jan 2012

"This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries — embraces every possibility"
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Title quote from Jorge Luis Borges, image from a children's playground structure I saw in Brooklyn Bridge Park while having similar thoughts.
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12 Jan 2012

Memory patina: an @rubensun connection from [temporarily] "perfect" devices
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Followup from yesterday's thought on patina and [temporarily] "perfect" devices. I love the connection Ruben makes here.

The article I reference is Absent-minded Robots Remember What Matters (Robots could mimic human forgetfulness to filter out less useful information.)
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11 Jan 2012

[temporarily] "Perfect" devices
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Had a discussion today about the jump rope I had once (see: Tangible/intuitive feedback, as illustrated by my broken jump rope), noting that "when it finally broke it was the most beautiful sense of accomplishment."

That's one reason I love the notion of patina; here's another: the past 2 decades or so we've been trying to make objects [temporarily] "perfect." See below, keeping your iPhone and the camera above in mind.

(...and for the truly insightful explanation, of course turn to BERG)
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10 Jan 2012

Design Metaphors
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A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by step.”

[...]

How many designers are clued in to the ongoing cognitive revolution and its potential for the built environment is unclear. But this collection of architects and projects herald more than just another stylistic or pyrotechnic, technology-driven trend. They point toward how the built environment could — and should — be radically reconceptualized around the fundamental workings of the human mind. We need, and are ever more in a position to create, a richer built environment, grounded in the way people actually experience the world around them.

via nytimes.com

This is why I have an entire Evernote notebook dedicated to collecting "design metaphors." Also I frequently recommend reading Lakoff / Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By.
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9 Jan 2012

[image macro/niche tumblr/video parody] : [conscious] :: [the cultural narrative driving a meme] :: [subconscious]. Or something like that.
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Brilliant cc: @calebkramer @kylecameron RT @conradlisco: Great example of a brand getting in on a meme/trend: bit.ly/nxP6Q5
— Mitch Kapler (@MitchKapler) January 9, 2012

Memes and popular culture are interesting to me, the cultural narratives that drive them more so. The manifestations (people are fond of calling them "memes" these days) are the conscious level, the narratives part of the collective subconscious.

One of those narratives manifests in a special kind of parody; as I see it it's sort of a reaction to the "extreme-ness" that millennials grew up with (think: 90's cereals and sat morning cartoons, polarizing political/cultural figures of the 90's, etc). Given enough prolonged exposure to an environment saturated by things espousing the 'extreme,' the natural response is to be wary of and mock the extreme.

This particular form of subconscious parody is captured consciously in the popularity of stuff like "Shit Girls Say"; if you're an ad type you might relate to http://fuckingcreatives.tumblr.com. And the above for the millenial yogaist. These personify the extremes of their respective personas, and their conscious popularity reflects the collective subconscious.
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4 Jan 2012

"Seemingly superflous"
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Stanford reviews a study showing how a simple change in wording can dramatically affect how we respond to the same information:

Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a “beast” preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a “virus” infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.

And:

In five experiments, test subjects were asked to read short paragraphs about rising crime rates in the fictional city of Addison and answer questions about the city. The researchers gauged how people answered these questions in light of how crime was described – as a beast or a virus.

They found the test subjects’ proposed solutions differed a great deal depending on the metaphor they were exposed to.

And:

“People like to think they’re objective and making decisions based on numbers,” Boroditsky said. “They want to believe they’re logical. But they’re really being swayed by metaphors.”

via bakadesuyo.com

This is why I have an entire Evernote notebook dedicated to design metaphors.
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3 Jan 2012

Behavior design, from "Of brains and cities; neuroscience and cultures of decision-making"
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The emerging discussion I personally found most interesting—and tested on Geoffrey West and others, who were receptive—was this idea of how we make public decisions. Given our cultures of decision-making, from the individual to the institutional, were designed in another time, is it any wonder these systems are struggling to deliver the kind of complex, longer-term, interdependent decisions we need to make today? Equally, we now know rather more about the way the individual and society works, and so have some idea that fundamental systems within the brain, such as the limbic system, seem to preference short-term decisions, for example, amongst a series of other unhelpful characteristics.

So the thought occurred: how can we better design our approach to public decision-making, in such a way that the structures and cultures mitigates against our inherent “limitations”? (Please note the inverted commas there, indicating the obvious value judgement.)

[…]

How to mitigate against our short-termism? How to understand our intrinsic irrationality in decision-making—as Daniel Kahneman’s book does (and see this review) —and yet build systems that enable coherent, responsible, decisive and resilient decision-making nonetheless? How could we construct approaches that mitigate against the likelihood that humans tend to feel greater sympathy for those that resemble them (racially, for instance)? How to compensate for the “planning fallacy”, the demonstated over-confidence of experts in their abilities, and numerous other cognitive biases that might shape public, representative decision-making? Given research indicates these characteristics, are we sure our current approaches might absorb and compensate for these instincts appropriately? How do we foreground conscious and rational decision-making when our subconscious and irrationality apparently shape our decision-making? What kind of structures and cultures might flex smartly in tension with these forces?

link: http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2011/12/brains-cities-neuroscience-decision-making.html

This is precisely what I mean by "designing environments for better long-term thinking." Behavior design.
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3 Jan 2012

There are no firsts on the Internet (alternatively: the value inherent in replication itself)
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Imitation is collaborative: It might be technically possible to dig back and find the originator of, say, Socially Awkward Penguin or Privilege Denying Dude, but the knowledge would be perfectly useless. Whatever life or value these things have lies in their reuse.

via pitchfork.com

What a beautiful explanation for why there are no firsts on the internet. (Not any that matter, anyway.)
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27 Dec 2011

"Television validates existence"
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26 Dec 2011

The decline of ghost stories
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Suppose you wanted to create your own digital ghost to live for eternity in the Internet and maybe do some haunting. What would that look like?

You'd start now, backing up everything that happens on your computer to the so-called cloud (storage on the Internet). You'd run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you.

[...]

If I had to predict the odds that digital ghosts will someday exist, I'd say 100%. Stay alive for another five years and you will live forever, sort of.

via dilbert.com

I wouldn't be surprised if people stop telling ghost stories in the future. Much like how the idea of telling the stories ancient people told about their gods would seem a bit silly now; the narratives will simply no longer have the need to exist.
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26 Dec 2011

The Information Machine (1958)
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via youtube.com

“Since the time when man began to control the environment he has been plagued by his limited ability to speculate..."

The first 2:30 of this video might be my favorite description of human limitation, design, and innovation through exposure for quite awhile.
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22 Dec 2011

“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
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“the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey

via thinkingalaud.posterous.com
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20 Dec 2011

"The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede."
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"The right art ", cried the Master, `is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
via thinkingalaud.posterous.com

Part of the direct / indirect metaphor I like to employ
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20 Dec 2011

from "An Internet of People"
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Over the past few years, a bunch of web-based marketplaces have gotten popular – Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnb, to name a few. Many of these business ideas had been tried before but are succeeding only now.

When a trend like this emerges, it’s always interesting to ask “why now?” For example, for almost a decade, entrepreneurs tried to create video sharing services like YouTube, but only succeeded when certain key dependencies – broadband, digital video cameras, a version of Flash that “just worked” – became widespread.

I asked Roelof Botha the “why now” question regarding web-based marketplaces. He said something I thought was really interesting: marketplaces depend on trust, and trust requires knowing the reputation of a prospective counterparty. Today, for the first time, you can get background information on almost any prospective counterparty by searching Google, Facebook etc. Or put more simply: we finally have an internet of people.

via cdixon.org
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19 Dec 2011

This is how decades-long megatrends take shape
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There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix. (See pictures of protesters around the world.)
"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

via time.com
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19 Dec 2011

Metacognition is itself a powerful thing
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What is valued is certainty. What is devalued in such a world is uncertainty. Those who aren't sure are weak. Poor. Faithless. Uncertainty is often worrying and feminised. Real men know real things. So they have been lining up to tell us that David Cameron's refusal to sign the EU treaty is the best thing ever to have happened, or the worst thing ever to have happened, when, actually, no one is quite sure. Reconciling a belief in the democratic process with the recognition that the euro is still in big trouble and Greece may well go anyway, means it is impossible to line up clearly in the Eurosceptic versus Europhile shadow boxing. It is up in the air.

via guardian.co.uk

In full the above article is a nice little bit on human limitation.
The following reader comment caught my attention: "The trouble is, we cannot escape the animal that lives inside all of us."
Yes we can, actually. It's called metacognition. I sometimes think of it as simply awareness, and I've come to find that simple awareness is much more powerful than we initially assume.
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15 Dec 2011

Environments are invisible
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“ Screens will read us; we will not only read them. This brings up the question of how our literacy of not only screens, but also our environments, will be altered forever. We will have to decide whether messages we see on signs that react to us, which change to our needs in real time based on how they acquire and process our demographic data is a deep violation of privacy or helpful, tailored information. Seoul on Display: How Global Screen Culture Will Affect Us - Atlantic Mobile

via deathbeard.tumblr.com

(maybe we're getting better at seeing them though?)
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