Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
One of the tricks I use as a comic writer is the imaginary last scene. In this case, the funny part is what you imagine happening after the comic is over. Your mind fills in the details. If I do my job right, everyone fills in the last scene with whatever works best for them. Some of you imagine something subtle and some of you have a more graphic interpretation. Personally, I see a time-lapse scenario that features bulging eyes and seasons changing. The important thing is that each of you imagines a scene that is customized to your sensibilities."
“A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So, here at start of 2010, a new decade, will try to write a short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle. [...]
There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.”
A cleareyed Malcolm Gladwell discusses the American penchant for reducing all activity to a moral lesson that can be imparted through the powerful cocktail of stage presence and rear-screen projection. Drawing a line from Benjamin Franklin to the homilies printed on Celestial Seasonings tea boxes, Mr. Gladwell says that even knotty concepts from fields like quantum physics and philology can be made attractive to large groups of people if the concepts are rendered as anecdotes involving a cabdriver, a small child or an obscure Flemish botanist. “Start with a personal anecdote,” Mr. Gladwell suggests, “and then extrapolate to the 18th-century cocoa trade in Malta.
10: OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE EFFICIENCIES
Before the World Wide Web there was Dialog.
Dialog was pretty futuristic. In the 1970s and '80s it was the closest thing to an electronic library there was, containing the world's scientific, scholarly, and journalistic texts. The only problem was its price, $1 per minute. You could spend a lot of money looking things up. At those prices only serious questions were asked. There was no fooling around, no making frivolous queries--like looking up your name. Waste was discouraged. Since searching was sold as a scarcity, there was little way to master the medium, or to create anything novel.
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Unplugging the Computer Metaphor | Psychology Today
Technology becomes metaphors; repeat.
A paradigm shift occurred in the 1960s: the cognitive revolution. Since that time it has become respectable to study cognition, although emotion and motivation were still considered suspect by many experimental psychologists. An integral part of the cognitive revolution was the computer metaphor for brain function. Psychological research during the past 40 years has been dominated by an information-processing model of brain function based on the computer metaphor."
At first glance,
and
from "Google’s New Glasses And The War On Serendipity" via new-aesthetic.tumblr.com
seem to be opposing viewpoints, no?
This apparent paradox could be seen as just an illusion of scale, perhaps. As in:
- Large things with major impacts benefit from a reduction in the amount of randomness, which leads to progress
- Small things with minor impacts benefit from an increase in the amount of randomness, which leads to serendipity
Which would be nice, because then all you'd have to do is figure out the difference between large things and small things, sorting based on their scope of impact.
Though unfortunately for our solution here, the historian Frank Gavin calls this the assesment of "chronological proportionality," noting that it's something humans are notoriously terrible at (see: Five Ways To Use History Well).
Not sure I have a better solution for you right away, just something to consider as you too wrestle with notions like progress and serendipity.
John's notes above from the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577298132546958436.html
(...Seems that unfortunately the only way to really get that across is to send you to a link that sends you to another link that sends you to a series of essays all responding to another link still, which itself is commentary on a panel exploring a series of links collected over a year into a tumblr.
Worth it, though, if you ask me.):
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/creators-project-in-response-t...
Simages, 2011
artnotfound: We're obsessed with automation, both as something scary and beautiful. Simages starts to point at that. We created this lovely, "ideal" living situation and then let it run automatically, only to watch the Sims lives crumble as they run on autopilot. Dirty dishes begin to pile up, the family stops talking to each other and they lose the things that make them a "perfect" family.
As we move to a more automated culture, we're making our lives easier while changing the perceived value of time management. We're working on an app that will automatically text your mother every night. Both as a practical way of automating love, and as a comment on how technology is changing time management. By exploring the limits of automation, we can have a better understanding of what it means to us and what the best path to take is. We can make an "informed" choice, so to speak.
louisdoulas: Time, seems to have become more combative, or least its passing more 'apparent' today. Have you ever used Steve Lambert's Self-Control app?
I think productivity and what it challenges and defines seems to be more and more of a preoccupation for this generation of cultural producers. These notions of leisure: recreation in contrast to 'productivity' and the strive for this supposed balance is something we think automation would hope to make easier, such as the app you're working on. But of course we can see this becoming problematic, this gesture of an automated text to one's mother.
artnotfound: It's post-trolling, an ironic and almost sinister gesture that reveals something really telling. It definitely makes texting your mother manually more meaningful if you have the option to do it automatically.
...
Consider movies. A well-made movie generates strong emotions in people even though we know the movie screen is not alive. We know the actors are acting, and the story isn't real, and still we have an emotional response. I believe our future robotic dogs will have the same impact on us as movies. We will always be aware of their non-living nature, but we'll be helpless to resist forming emotional connections. If you doubt that humans can form emotional connections with objects, check out the stock price of Apple."
"They see the world differently to us, picking up on things we miss.
They adapt to us, our routines. They look to us for attention, guidance and sustenance. We imagine what they are thinking, and vice-versa.
Dogs? Or smartphones?"
"I will hammer that iron nail a bit more, in case you aren’t getting it yet. Because this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged “thinking machines.” When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
...
Pretending otherwise is like making Super Mario the best man at your wedding. No matter how much time you spend with dear old Super Mario, he is going to disappoint in that role you chose for him. You need to let Super Mario be super in the ways that Mario is actually more-or-less super. Those are plentiful. And getting more so. These are the parts that require attention, while the AI mythos must be let go."
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
