Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
Not that it would make sense for you to jump straight to slide 47 in the above, but that bit on metaphor stands out to me; I've been thinking much lately on how deeply connections and metaphor are threaded into the way we experience and make sense of the world.
Moving ideas cognitively to create metaphor seems just as critical "work" as moving stones physically to build the foundation of a house.
Elevator
Nodes is a software solution that shows the relationship between seemingly divergent topics through a simple graphic interface. Search a subject term and Nodes creates a network of topics (obvious or obscure) that relate in some way. This system would be grown by a global community that tags articles and helps build the connections.
Description
One of the signature characteristics of a creative mind is the ability to see problems from different angles. Today, more and more industries are looking for individuals who can dynamically approach problems from varying points of view. Yet, our current educational system promotes understanding the world via single-problem/single-solution relationships. The question then stands, how do we train students to think holistically when they are only being fed myopic causal relationships?
Nodes is a software solution that allows teachers and students to immediately see the relationship between seemingly divergent topics through a simple graphic interface. The user would populate the search field in the center of Nodes and then points of information would populate the screen for the user to explore. Any topic could be entered and evaluated. Say for instance the user was to enter “American Revolution.” Nodes would send the query to our servers and reply with things such as:
Athens – Birthplace of the ideology that would become the North Star of modern governments around the Globe.
2011 Egyptian Revolution – An example of a modern revolution and a fight for freedom.
Triangle Trade – Trade circle between the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Anti-Smoking Legislation – Tobacco was a huge financer of the war, and an industry grew out of the aftermath. Causing an epidemic of oral cancer across America.
Vietnam – A French colony that once independent would tie up the U.S in a bloody conflict for years.
Olympic Shooting – The world’s first sharpshooters were created in this war, and they would lay the groundwork for an Olympic sport.
Each topic would come with an explanation of the relationship as well as links to websites were they can learn more. This software is a blend of Google, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and RSS feeds. If we can simply show the relationships between topics, both academic and cultural/social/pop-culture, we can hopefully open students minds to a wealth of possibilities.
The real value of Nodes is that it is directly shaped by the contributions of a greater global community. We would provide browser-based widgets that allow people to tag, describe and post articles to the Nodes database. Just as easily as people post to Reddit or Delicious, they could post to a system that helps children around the world become more effective and creative students. Tags could consist of different school subjects that the article relates to as well as interests and potentially careers that are effected by the subject matter. Curators (potentially made up of a community of power users) will help maintain the integrity of the system by helping filter out bad tags, system gaming, etc.
Nodes can be an excellent resource for students, teachers and parents alike. Teachers use this as a tool to help build lesson plans and to help kids draw connections between what they’re learning and what they’re into. Students use this system as a research tool for homework. Parents use the system to help their kids with their projects.
My favorite NRBLB concept - captures "seemingly," "connections/metaphors," and "combinations of disparate ideas" in one nice round.
The two articles below have an interesting relationship. The first praises the use of passively collected data, as a way to visualize common social habits:
The Top 3 Facebook Message Subject Lines
November 16, 2010
In Facebook’s announcement yesterday detailing their updated messaging system, the social network shares the three most frequently used subject lines in their messages (pictured in the screen grab above). The video overview on their blog cites these totally bland, and difficult to organize conversation headings as one of the many reasons it is looking to simplify communication with friends and family. Their new system, “Messages,” eschew subject lines in favor of a more instantaneous, chat-style response format.
The second article praises privacy over information related to personal messages:
It’s Like Spammers Took Over Technology
November 17, 2010
Dave Winer, a pioneer behind blogging, podcasting and RSS, writes that he is not too happy with how some of the social networking apps for the iPhone and Twitter — and in general, the technology industry, intrude on the personal information of its users. He writes about his recent experience with the new social network on iPhone, Path, and how the app searched his phone’s address book to suggest some friends for him, even when it never seemed to have taken his permission to do so.
Winer goes on to compare their action with someone reading his credit card number aloud in the public and dubs the tech industry as a virus.
It’s like spammers took over technology, like the pet food guys did in 1999. Everyone has a scam. This year the scam is to grab all the user’s data and resell it. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a risky proposition to try out a new iPhone product.
Another example. When I realized that any random Twitter app who you give your credentials to can download all your private direct messages, that was the end of me using Twitter apps that want credentials. Meanwhile the team at Twitter Corp has always had access to this info. Who’s to say their interpretation of one of their terms of service is that they get to analyze and mine every bit of text I enter into the system even text that’s only meant for one other person to read?
The same thing is happening in both; information is being captured directly from private messages. Reminds me of the idea that when it comes to privacy, technology isn't the problem - people are the problem [see: On the future of intelligent, user-recognizing technology and the threat of spam]. (and of course, the problems both create will always continue to exist)
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.])
