How To Break Anything

Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.

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      22 Mar 2010

      Information -> Incubation -> Insight

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      Media_httpthisisindex_zixus
      via thisisindexed.com

      How appropriate that this has been sketched as an exponential function.

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      17 Mar 2010

      Focus as status symbol: "The Age Of External Memory"

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      David Dalrymple finds that "filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill" in the digital age:

      Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.

      via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

      ...or at least "focus as the key mechanism driving the acquisition of other status symbols."

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    • Contributors

      Kyle Cameron Studstill
    • Obox Design
  • How To Break Anything

    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.])

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