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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      23 Jan 2012

      The easiest way to solve any problem is to organize it.

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      via youtube.com

      A few days ago I had been thinking on a complex problem, and it struck me that the easiest way to solve any problem is to first organize it.

      It's not really that profound of a thought; really it just comes from my background as a trends consultant, since trends consulting is basically just a process of organizing information. It was back then that I started to realize that in many ways my primary talent in life, in many various facets, is simply: organization.

      But the thought struck me deeply because I realized this has been my approach for as long as I could remember.

      I instantly flashed back to being young - elementary school - finding it odd that people thought I was smart at least because I was so good at math. (Arithmetic didn't seem like something that should be hard, so it struck me as odd that people would use it to judge how smart I was.) In a way that I can only say in retrospect, arithmetic was supremely natural to me, because numbers are so easy to organize. One popular commenter on the video above feels like something I may have even tried to tell a classmate once upon a time: "You just shuffle numbers to make easiest, fastest way to process."

      That strange feeling just kind of went away to the background of subconsciousness for a long long time.

      And then I saw the above video.

      It really hammers in the point that the "organization" philosophy is simply this:

      To reality and the universe, information is the same no matter how it's presented - so organization can indeed seem superfluous. But presenting it in certain ways can make information mean different things to *humans*, and that is all the difference. 

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      20 Nov 2010

      The Library of Congress adds 11,000 books to its collection every day

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      From The Library of Congress. 11,000 books a day probably seems like a lot, but remember that *everything* is data - we just happen to have come a across 'books' as a relatively efficient way to organize it.

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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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