"Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obliged to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how the world turns.”— Sidney Harman (via tylrd)
Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
We rightly understand that how we arrange atoms is more important than what atoms we use. Same with information. The arrangement is more important than the ingredients.
I'm quite fond of saying that traditional architects organize physical space to enable better wayfinding and allow for certain kinds of movement through space; information artists organize information to enable better decisions and certain kinds of thinking. This is "human programming."
The photo sharing/social network app Color launched last week, and much fuss was made for a variety of reasons: massive media hype, massive funding, and a complete lack of documentation about how people should actually use the app. Mike 3K found this brilliant iPhone app store review of Color, which makes the whole affair worthwhile. Read the whole thing here.
An information artist crafts structure from existing cultural narratives, exposing the power of storytelling as a method of classification.
By blending expected and unexpected uses of information, the above describes Color as a Myst-like fantasy experience, adding notes like "casting the Google spell" and drawing on the growing collective awareness (fear?) of devices that listen softly to our every action.
It's important to note that the fundamental elements of what makes the review worth posting on Boinb Boing are not drawn from what Color actually is. Instead it draws from the expectations of what people wanted it to be.
An important distinction - because Color's entry into the photosharing scene came with a lot of hype about the future of social networking, I'm reminded of the idea that the most valuable thing about predictions is not in how accurate they are about the future; they do the more important job of expressing what people hope for in the present.
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.])
