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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      21 May 2011

      Mapping cyclical cultural change over time

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      8449fc5b59b64797a9727905d40a828c_7

      The above came together in a collaborative project as part of game.nypl.org, inspired by Cassini's Map Of The World. This has been attributed to Cassini only in name (generally thought to be almost certainly in error); it is in fact a single document built from a collaborative collection of maps, compiled in the 18th century - each piece represented the not-yet-completed thoughts of explorers of earth and space, who together put together a single piece of work that collectively helped each better understand a bigger picture of the world. 

      During the Find The Future game I was challened to create a document in similar fashion,starting with a framework that others could then add upon. The result above gives me some new directions to think about and expand upon; roughly speaking the x-axis is time, and the y-axis is something like "degree of similarity." That is to say, today's nostalgia looks very similar to tomorrow's cutting-edge art.  
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      29 Nov 2010

      Wikileaks, social intelligence, and the challenge of chronological proportionality

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      One thing the last 30 years have taught us that the media is consistently terrible at identifying what's going to be important 30 years later. [see: Frank Gavin - Five Ways To Use History Well]

      Watching the wikileaks conversation spread gets me thinking that I suppose in 30 years we'll see how much better "empowered networks of individuals" are at it. ('it' being the task of correctly assessing the chronologically proportional weight of events, in the present, without the advantage of historical perspective aka hindsight)

      My initial response is to reflect on our characteristic short-sightedness and propensity to get excited about *seemingly* important things and think "probably not much better," but then I get to thinking what we'd be talking about would be an emergent display of social forecasting, and a key property of emergent behavior is in fact its unexpectedness.

      Sort of like ants that correctly predict the oncoming of a flood and build barriers accordingly, that might be the quintessential example.

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      9 May 2010

      "I make, therefore I am": historical evolution, philosophical/scientific/entrepreneurial/artistic revolutions

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      Screen_shot_2010-05-09_at_10

       

      [via situated urbanism]

      The above speaks to something I think about when I wonder about the Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist balance: how does this balance shift back and forth (or alternatively: in one direction) over time?

      Psea

      To me it hints at the idea that throughout history cultural sentiment has shifted from "the Philosopher is the most important figure of our time" (circa 1350 - 17th century?) to "the Scientist is the most important figure of our time" (circa 1473 - late 19th century?) to "the Entrepreneur is the most important figure of our time" (early 18th century - present??). (obviously these overlap in time, much like they overlap in individuals)

      I should take a second to distinguish between what the statement in the image means to me and (my impression of) what the individual is trying to express because there's an important point to be made here about perspective: the statement in the image expresses the assertion that "the Entreprenuer is the most important figure ever, because Entrepreneur actually makes things."

      Not so sure I would go as far as to say "____ is obviously the best thing to be." Making things is obviously important; it's why I've devoted a full half of the PSAE model to it (the 'popular' half). But one of the reasons I started building this framework is to answer the question of how 'making things' fits into a larger scheme of what things are valuable and why. 

      One last thought, that if people like Hugh MacLeod, Lewis Hyde, Seth Godin, et al are right we'll be entering the age of the Artist soon enough as well.
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      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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