Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
This is probably increasingly relevant as devices continue to increase in complexity. To paraphrase Chris Heathcote over at anti-mega.com:
"the world is going to get strange and magical, and people will be confused and fearful. Designers will have to do what they do best, helping people navigate these environments"
If you click through the second image, you'll see the placard from the Rose Center for Earth and Space describing this photograph from the Apollo 17 mission:
"The Sculptured Hills appear in the center background, and the flank of South Masif looms at right. A discarded plastic rock sample bag lies alongside Apollo's final footprints."
What a strange choice of words. I'm reminded again of a passage from Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things (PDF):
If we were to judge ourselves by the efforts of ours that survive the passage of time, we'd be best described as Man The Rubbish Maker . We've been polluting since before we were human. Chipping rocks into tools is a messy, haphazard process. When archeologists investigate ancient rock foundries, they always find vastly more rock waste than they ever find tools. Rock waste is the earliest form of pollution.
As you might imagine, there are a number of people actively debating the complicated ethical questions surrounding how to approach our exploration of extraterrestrial environments. (see: Martin Rees, Life's Future in the Cosmos)
I really like thinking about the concept of "seeming." Seeming implies that there is more to be known about the world, that we just haven't yet grasped.
I particularly like the notion applied to goals: ends that seem like they should be goals - but just because it's intuitive for us to think they're worthy doesn't mean they are ultimately valuable.
"Art is long and time is fleeting."
"Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."
"Science is organized knowledge"
"The true university of these days is a collection of books."
"No great thinker ever lived and taught all the wonder that his soul received."
"Memory is the treasurer and guardian of all things."
"Order is Heaven's first law."
"The universal cause acts to one end but acts by various laws."
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
"Give instruction unto those who cannot procure it themselves."
The above is from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas; I'm presently studying causality. I sometimes think it's the only thing worth studying*.
Especially considering the nice little bit inside this article on Malebranch's thinking in The Search For Truth, where he defines a real cause as "something between which and it's effects, the mind perceives a necessary connection."
'Perceives' is the critical word here. The foundation of a thesis that is slowly brewing in my mind is that the human brain is distinctly, consistently, and measurably limited in a number of interesting and important ways - this has profound implications on the things we perceive, and therefore the things we believe (subtext: we should have little expectation that the things we believe correspond with reality).
Another way of thinking about this is that if we're limited in the way we perceive things, then the connections we make between causes and effects aren't necessarily the reality of what causes an effect. The connections we make just happen to be the ones that are most intuitive to us.
What follows from this is that if our conception of cause and effect is suspect, then we should be careful about the way we think of something a little more tangible: decision-making.
That is to say, if we are aware of our limitations in understanding the impact of our decisions, perhaps we can be a little more careful about judging what "right" and "wrong" decisions look like.
One idea I really like around this topic is Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which I take as a framework for illustrating how the decisions and events we think are important almost never are.
*I don't think this all the time, obviously. Studying general concepts gives you a high-level scope, like looking down on the world from the furthest zoom on a digital map; useful for understanding the world, not so useful for understanding how to get from your house to the mall. When I say "making things a little more tangible" in the above, I'm essentially saying something like "zooming in a little bit."
[from Daniel M Wegner's The Illusion Of Conscious Will]
You may know that I really like illusions - mostly for their ability to concisely illuminate human limitation and fallibility. I now also really like this term "tactile ventriloquism." Will be thinking on how to work 'ventriloquism' into more concepts - it's a wonderful word, etymologically.
[Bertrand Russell interpreting Spinoza and Leibniz, from Simon Van Booy's "Why Our Decisions Don't Matter"]
The above is from Analytic of the Sublime within Kant's Critique of Judgment; his distinction between art and handicraft is characteristic of Seth Godin's idea of art as a gift in his book Linchpin.
As you may know, Kant is known for his demanding definitions. Relevant in this case is the definition of "free," as in "free to create something of value." For Kant, no act is free if it is ultimately by an external motive. That is to say, if the motivation is money, then the act is not art, because the thing ultimately driving the act is not the doer but the thing providing the reward (this actually applies even if the intent is to use the money for something internal, like the desire for food - in this case, nature is the driver, not the thinker). No large point here, just another exploration of natural value in contrast to monetary value to consider.
[From The Timetables of Technology, Brian Bunch & Alexander Hellemans]
One could also look at this through the lens of network theory, looking at how nodes isolated from the rest of the network have the opportunity to develop independently. This isn't always a good thing, sometimes it is.In fact the authors go on to say that this model breaks down as more complex methods of communication develop in the world; it seems that this kind of isolation is a rare artifact of the era anthropologists are calling the metal age. Â
[from The Oxford Encyclopedia of The Modern World]
Two interesting things to consider:
1) This can refer to "technology" not only as electronics, but as any tool that humans have employed to capture some desired value more efficiently.
[Althusser on social practices from John Scott's Sociological Theory]
'Knowledge' as the output of the Theoretical function vs 'Products' as the output of the Economic function reminds me of the "thinking vs doing" idea that's so pervasive at this point in our cultural history. I was recently reminded of the idea that "those that can, do; those that cannot, teach." A curious paradigm; it quite nicely illustrates that we live in an era celebrating the doer, indeed. [further reading: One Model For Thinking About Roles And Relationships]
This little guy's name is Jason Cordero, and he goes by the title of Pianist/Music Star/World's Happiest Boy.
Watching young kids play music well always reminds me of how deeply interconnected we are as humans - this manifests itself particularly well in how children learn through mimicry. As you watch children like this play, you see all the minute and sometimes imperceptable details/behaviors expressed by their mentors, tutors, instructors and role models, captured perfectly in the way these kid's perform. Was actually in an interesting conversation about the motivation here just yesterday, watching a seven year old masterfully play a couple of violin pieces. I started talking about the critical role of exposure - the idea being that for kids like these, if all you're exposed to is the violin, it makes perfect sense that you grow up loving the violin and being incredibly good at it at an incredibly early age. Very much a Gladwell-esque 10,000 hours kind of point. My intelligent friend brought up the question of distinguishing between kids who are exposed to a particular craft at a young age and go on to practice because they are intrinsically motivated, and those that find themselves repelled by the craft, resenting the parents for making them go through it, etc. I haven't done a great deal of thinking on it, but my reaction was along the lines of "you only love or hate those things that you're exposed to (and those things make up an incredibly small set of all the things that actually exist in the world), and you do so by comparing the relative worth of each to you (and only compare with items within this set)." Essentially the point is that is you love violin this much as a kid, it is precisely because you have been exposed to no [few] other activities to compare it with that you might like more. This is a completely different point from my friend's argument, that activities contain - intrinsically within them - properties that individuals do or do not like, and these are accepted or rejected accordingly upon exposure. A lot more thinking can be done and expressed on it of course, I just find it fascinating and important to think through how we come to like/ dislike/value/find unworthy activities and challenges. Other important questions to ask are: "where is it that you think this talent comes from in the first place (if you think that such a thing exists)?" and "what then, is the best (optimal) set of decisions these parents should make for their kids?"
[from National Cutures of The World: A Statistical Reference]
"Natural historians have recognized a hierarchy of exogeneity whereby certain natural phenomenon are necessary conditions (and simultaneously historical precedents) to others. Climate, for example, is a necessary condition for marine and animal/human life, which is in turn a necessary condition for culture or cultural behavior."
"Every age uses dress and body decoration to signal what is most important at that historical moment. Throughout most of our history that message has been "I am rich" or "I am powerful." If today more and more people use their dress to assert: "I am authentic," it is simply evidence of our hunger for the genuine article in an age which seems to so many to be one of simulation and hype."
-StreetStyle, 1993 [tedpolhemus.com for more on the historical search for 'authenticity']
I like this definition of poetry as "organized use of language that cannot be replaced by paraphrase."
Seth has been talking a lot lately on art, in Linchpin and otherwise, as the act of creating something that connects with and changes someone. I like that model, and I'm beginning to incorporating the idea of irreplaceability. As in: you don't have to worry about anyone stealing your best ideas; if they are truly that good, they are the result of an irreplicable amount of work - cognitive or otherwise.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.])
