I just read a great article from Frog Design that highlights 8 lessons for creating social impact. The lessons, quoted here, seem right on the money: 1. Undervalue Your Own Ideas. They may seem pretty clever to you, but chances are that they won’t work the way that you are imagining. Trust me on this …
Social media is hot, but its application by many public figures and agencies is less on the social part — the part with trust, relationships, and dialogue — and more on the media part.
I look at the Law of Simplicity that suggests that more emotion is better (for simplicity) and argue that it might be so, but it also reduces clarity, which is what simplicity tries to imbue.
In John Maeda’s 5th Law of Simplicity, he states that simplicity and complexity need each other. While true, the challenge that more complexity adds is evident in that there is simply more complexity. Another look at the relationship between simplicity and complexity.
John Maeda’s 4th Law of Simplicity states: “knowledge makes everything simpler”. In this post I lay out why this might be only partly correct, suggest that there are problems where this works better than other and illustrate how knowledge can also make things more complex, rather than simple.
John Maeda has taken on the task of exploring simplicity as a means of making sense of a complex world. In this post I explore his 10 laws and introduce an argument that challenges three of these laws.
I recently participated in a conference call looking to establish a conference on reducing complexity (and whether it can be done). The answer to that question is dependent upon answering whether we can create the necessary conditions to answer the question in the first place.
Complexity science provides many tempting explanations for human behaviour, but often based on rhetoric rather than evidence. If the a social science of complexity is to move ahead, more attention to the science than theory is necessary.
Finding our way in a complex system is tricky. Social network maps can provide a way forward, but only if viewed as tools for complicated problems and not as true wayfinding solutions for complex ones.
Design thinking may be more of a stance than a theory or method and Roger Martin’s recent talk on design thinking illustrates how teaching and encouraging new ways of viewing problems may provide better ways of solving them.
