Archives
Decoupling creators from their creations
Posted on June 1, 2017 Leave a Comment
The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. […]
My troubled relationship with social media
Posted on April 1, 2016
Do you care about donuts? I did, once. I’m not so sure anymore. I used to love donuts, was passionate about donuts and spent the better part of my early career looking at the power of social media to transform our understanding of and engagement with donuts. Just this week, I had a paper published that […]
Collective action, impact, intelligence & stupidity
Posted on February 4, 2016
Collective impact is based largely on the concept that we can do more together than apart, which holds true under the assumption that we can coordinate, organize and execute as a unit. This assumption doesn’t always hold true and the implications for getting it wrong require serious attention. Anyone interested in social change knows that […]
Mental health: talking and listening
Posted on January 27, 2016
Innovation might be doing things different to produce value, but there’s little value if we as a society are not able to embrace change because we’re hiding from mental illness either as individuals, organizations or communities. Without wellbeing and the space to acknowledge when we don’t have it any new product, idea or opportunity will […]
Frogs, Pots, Blogs and Social Media
Posted on December 30, 2015 5 Comments
Our information landscape has been compared with our diets providing an ample opportunity to compare what we ‘consume’ with how we prepare food and perhaps draw on the analogy of the frog and the boiling point of water. Are we slowly killing our ability to produce independent thought through vehicles like blogs as we draw […]
Social innovation, social inclusion
Posted on August 27, 2015 4 Comments
Social innovation is about bringing new ideas, products and services out into society with others for social benefit and improving the lives of our communities. While not every innovation will benefit everyone, there is a need to examine more deeply the question of who benefits(?) when we consider social innovation and that means taking some […]
Seeing the lights in research with our heads in the clouds
Posted on July 11, 2014 3 Comments
Some fields stagnate because they fail to take the bold steps into the unknown by taking chances and proposing new ideas because the research isn’t there to guide it while social innovation has a different twist on the problem: it has plenty of ideas, but little research to support those ideas. Unless the ideas and […]
The New Zombie
Posted on October 24, 2013 1 Comment
Information is everywhere (and if you live in cities, people might be everywhere, too) and yet the volume of information we see is overwhelmed by what we do not see. Zombies are among us like information and because of that information might be less attuned to what is going on around them. This has enormous consequences and most of it is not good.
Shaking the System of Knowledge Translation and Journalism
Posted on September 10, 2013
Leveraging systems change comes when you are willing to examine the system itself, not just the component parts. News media is struggling to remain financially viable in a time when readership / viewership is high and revenues low by considering ways to adapt to an online world and the way it thinks about the problem […]
300: Crises in Complexity, Opportunities in Design
Posted on August 31, 2013 2 Comments
In 2009 Censemaking was launched as a platform to explore issues in complexity and ways we can make sense of it to design for better futures and a sustainable world. After 300 posts it has become evident that there is much more to write as we see ever-new crises from complexity and ever-greater design opportunities […]
