Archives
You Want It Darker?
Posted on November 11, 2016 1 Comment
It is poetic irony on many levels that weeks after Leonard Cohen releases his album about the threat of death that he passes on, mere days after we saw the least poetic, most crass election campaign end in the United States with an equally dramatic outcome. This points to art, but also to the science of […]
Of tails, dogs and the wagging of both
Posted on September 23, 2014
Evaluation is supposed to be driven by a program’s needs and activities, but that isn’t always the case. What happens when the need for numbers, metrics, ‘outcomes’ and data shape the very activities programs do and how that changes everything is something that is worth paying some attention to. Since the Second World War we’ve […]
Jaron Lanier and Dominant Design
Posted on March 11, 2010 4 Comments
Are we creating path dependencies with our creative technologies that actually limit creativity? Jaron Lanier thinks so and in this post I introduce the concept of dominant design and what it means in terms of technological and social innovation.
Social (non) Sense-making
Posted on February 7, 2010 2 Comments
What is true in the world of social media and decision making is a matter of interpretation. However that interpretation, often off-loaded to others in crowdsourcing models, might not work well when strong ties are needed to foster quality decisions.
The Fallacy of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted on January 3, 2010 5 Comments
New Year’s resolutions don’t work and can sometimes make things worse. Maybe the problem is less about us and the entire thought process that informs why we plan change in such linear ways to begin with.
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Posted on November 27, 2009 1 Comment
Our tweets and Facebook posts provide us with new ways to tell stories that can be as rich as traditional methods. By viewing these narrative fragments in context, we can learn a lot about our world and the way that we communicate.
Amazing Stuff: Halloween Edition
Posted on October 31, 2009 1 Comment
This week’s Halloween edition of Amazing stuff highlights a short video on complexity science (and organizing a children’s party), an unexpected (and amusing) link between environmental health + pornography, a map of illness, marketing and PR for the masses, and figuring out what meaning really means in the world of design.
