Archives
Disrupted Time: Review of Present Shock
Posted on August 18, 2013 1 Comment
Most simply, ‘present shock’ is the human response to living in a world that’s always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it’s the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it’s just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally […]
Complexity and the Senseless Marketing of the Future
Posted on July 16, 2012
Futurists take what we know now and project into the future ideas about things will be like years from today using the models that have worked consistently up to now. Those models applied to human systems are changing quickly making marketing the future based on them senseless and potentially dangerous. Earlier this past week a […]
The Complexity Challenge
Posted on June 30, 2011 2 Comments
Addressing the challenge of complexity is, ironically or perhaps appropriately, complex. But the challenge of dealing with the negative outcomes resulting from overly simple approaches to dealing with complexity will ultimately be far more so.
A Complex View of New Year’s Resolutions
Posted on December 28, 2010 5 Comments
By paying attention — being mindful — of what you’re doing and how it is working, you can start to build a longer-term strategy or pattern of activity that moves you along to where you want to go. It also prevents you from the let down at having not achieved your goals, but setting yourself up for success rather than failure. These kinds of strategies address the complexity of human lives and provide a useful replacement for New Year’s Resolutions.
Emotional Complexity
Posted on May 29, 2010
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.
Complexity is to Difference as Simplicity is to…?
Posted on May 24, 2010 1 Comment
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.
Rethinking the Relationship Between Simplicity, Complexity and Knowledge
Posted on May 23, 2010 5 Comments
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.
Is Simplicity the Antidote to Complexity?
Posted on May 22, 2010 2 Comments
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.
Seeing Simplicity / Seeing Complexity
Posted on October 24, 2009 4 Comments
We often confuse simplicity and complexity, which can have harmful effects on our health and social wellbeing. The confusion between the complex and the simple as it relates to public health is discussed in this look at issues like vaccination and cigarette smoking.
