interesting - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

"Now that optical recognition technology has come in, Google could take a book, put it on a scanner, and the computer turns it into a digital file that you can search. There's a frightening amount of information suddenly; in a year, kids will be scanning all my books, the menu of what they ate for lunch – all they'll have to do is point and click and it turns everything into a file, so the entire planet becomes searchable. I do think that is very spooky, and I don't like it at all." You see, I pounce again – the future is a terrible place!

19 Oct 09

…My heart’s in Accra » Wu Tang and a wider world

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culture music interesting religion anthropology

12 Oct 09

Putting people first » On using design to influence behaviour

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design research interesting apps behaviour

07 Oct 09

The Art of With.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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culture future trends collaboration interesting

03 Oct 09

How to live off the grid

www.wired.co.uk/...how-to-live-off-the-grid.aspx - Preview

interesting green environment

28 Sep 09

YouTube - Lift

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video interesting

Johnny Holland - It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive » Good IxDers borrow, great ones steal ….

johnnyholland.org/...ixders-borrow-great-ones-steal - Preview

design interesting video architecture language society anthropology research

But what is it that they actually do that’s so useful to design? Social scientists are essentially professional observers, using ethnographic tools to understand what they see, and manage any potential biases they might have. My favourite ethnographic technique or term is that of ‘thick description’: coined by Clifford Gertz as a way to sum up how we should analyse objects including their multiple meanings, rather than just what it was (a ‘thin description’).
Erving Goffman’s idea of front and back stage actions (for example, how waiters act in the public part of the restaurant vs. behind the swinging door, amongst other examples)
7 more annotations...
- Cultures use myth, storytelling, and rituals in similar ways to help make meaning and sense out of the world - Joseph Campbell lays this out in his book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”, while Claude Levi-Strauss does it more densely in “The Raw and The Cooked“
- Actor-network theory (ANT) - created by Bruno Latour and others with the main gist that a lot happens between people and other agents (even inanimate objects), and that this is in a continual state of change.
- Why: While architecture may seem to be at the opposite end of the design spectrum to IxD - we deal with the personal and ephemeral, they the collective and permanent - it has a few points worth noting:
  
  a need to deal with complex living systems
  a history of encouraging research in their field (something that pushes it far ahead of say, industrial design)
  and a general philosophical bent to their work (no wonder Ayn Rand was able to set a book and ideology behind an architect!)
- Why: Mental models didn’t start with Indy Young, and affordances didn’t start with Don Norman. Some of the ideas behind affordances can be traced back to the Gestalt theorists - a school of thought believing in the importance of patterns and that the sum of something is greater than the parts.
- Why: There’s been a growing discussion in the last few years on the role of language in design, including Adaptive Path and Cooper. However, linguists assert that language has a profound effect on how we perceive the world in general. Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘Metaphors We Live By’ is a classic that suggests we have fundamental linguistic metaphors that shape our lives e.g.:
  
  IDEAS are CONTAINERS
  TIME is IN FRONT OF US and we MOVE THROUGH IT
  HAPPINESS is UP, SADNESS is DOWN
- Interaction design or experience design is about just that - interactions and experiences. Literature explores these thing - slowly, carefully, leaving room for interpretation.
- The general steal: The ultimate in low-fi experience prototyping, literature can give inspiration and a method of slowing down.

27 Sep 09

FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - People Like Us

www.ft.com/...65-11de-9b7f-00144feabdc0.html - Preview

middle_east interesting books

After Cairo, Luyendijk moved to Lebanon and then to East Jerusalem to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Dutch TV. Here he came across new distortions. The conflict was produced for TV, he argues. The stone-throwing, the suicide bombs, the 24 hours that Israel waits before responding to a Palestinian attack so that the world can reflect on Israel’s pain – all this exists chiefly so that TV news can cover it.
TV reporters are slaves to their images; they can tell only the story shown by the images, because images speak so much louder than words. TV can convey the horror of a suicide bomb but it is less effective at conveying the humiliation of daily life under occupation. In any case, the Palestinians are no good at producing those images for TV.
2 more annotations...
- Israel excels at baking the bread. It knows just how to package a soundbite or image for TV, whereas Palestinian spokesmen drone on in incomprehensible language. In fact, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat deliberately kept articulate Palestinians off air for fear that they would acquire their own power bases.
- Luyendijk acknowledges that a few serious publications, such as the New York Review of Books and a handful of others, carry accurate reporting on the Middle East. Unfortunately, hardly anyone reads them. TV, the dominant medium, distorts the
  picture and rarely explains how it gets “the story”

25 Sep 09

Practical Access to Service Design.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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services design interesting

24 Sep 09

After capitalism « Prospect Magazine

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future capitalism trends idea interesting

21 Sep 09

Kent police attribute massive reduction in crime to neighbourhood teams | Politics | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...lice-crime-neighbourhood-teams - Preview

society crime interesting innovation services design

Officers in Kent are attributing a virtuous set of crime-fighting and performance figures to the creation of neighbourhood task teams, units specifically tasked to deal with antisocial behaviour, vandalism, petty offending and nuisance issues flagged up by the public.
Eighty-four officers across the county work solely on these priorities, deployed separately to the beat officers who conduct routine patrols and those colleagues who deal with major offences and emergencies. They are ringfenced and cannot be redeployed to other duties save for under exceptional circumstances.
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- "The thing about these dedicated units is that they to deal with these things. They can tackle that in a sustained way while the other response officers deal with the other calls. It was a new concept. We didn't know whether it would work . But we have been totally convinced by the results."
- When the MoD were ordered to make big cuts, they employed a company and principles of lean management and that is what we have been doing. Staff look at various administrative processes and say where there is waste.
- We choose officers for these teams who are willing and flexible. Often they have to change hours and shifts at short notice. But what they have is a great deal of job satisfaction because the community really appreciates what they are doing. Because these are quality of life issues, you have a far bigger positive impact on the local community."
- The concentration on low-level offending borrows heavily from the "broken windows" theory, which was first articulated the 1980s by the criminologist George L Kelling. "Consider a building with a few broken windows," he wrote.
  "If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside."
- Problem areas identified become the focus for follow-up work by partners such as the council and can lead to a variety of longer term solutions being tried. Housing estates may get new facilities; individuals identified as habitual troublemakers may receive support from social agencies.

20 Sep 09

William Dalrymple on the new generation of travel writers | Books | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...travel-writing-writers-future - Preview

travel interesting essential

But the attitudes of today's travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily "as an act of domination".
Also, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other. The history of travel is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures and other parts of the world in this way. Then there are those whose views have changed dramatically as they travelled, and have had their horizons widened: see how the prejudices against Islamic culture and civilisation expressed by the young Robert Byron in his first letters from India disappear as he sets off on the Road to Oxiana. As the great French traveller Nicolas Bouvier wrote in The Way of the World, the experience of being on the road, "deprived of one's usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper" reduces you, yet makes you at the same time more "open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight ... You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you."
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- Above all, I had to consider whether travel writing was still a form that could adapt to this very changed world. With the book finished, and having read a lot of the more recent travel books produced by younger writers, I have not the slightest doubt that the genre has a great deal of life in it yet. For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It's possible to cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms - biography, or anthropological writing - or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin's footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.
- As Jonathan Raban once remarked: "Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they meet the brute differences in everything of importance."
- Raban is not alone in this conviction. Rory Stewart, probably the most highly regarded of the younger generation of travel writers, believes passionately that travel books allow writers to explore other cultures in a slow and unhurried way that is impossible with journalism or most other forms of non-fiction. "Just look what gets written about Afghanistan," he says. "In an age when journalism is becoming more and more etiolated, when articles are becoming shorter and shorter, usually lacking all historical context, travel writing is one of the few venues to write with some complexity about an alien culture.
- Stewart is also sure that the kind of travel writing which will show the greatest durability is that where an informed observer roots and immerses himself in one place, commiting time to get to know a place and its languages. Many of the greatest of the travel books of the late 20th century were about epic journeys, often by young men, conveying the raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is endless, and deadlines and commitments are non-existent; when experience is all you hope to achieve and when the world is laid out before you like a map: think of the exhilaration of Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush or Byron's The Road to Oxiana
- Today, however, many of the most interesting travel books are by individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately: such as Iain Sinclair's circling of the capital in London Orbital or Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. There is also Ghosh in his Egyptian village, published as In an Antique Land, or Christopher de Bellaigue's magnificent recent study, Rebel Land, which examines the way that the ghosts of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish nationalism haunt a single remote town in eastern Turkey. As Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller "needs to train his eye in the way an ethnographer does . . . to remain relevant and stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions, history, economy, and politics."

16 Sep 09

Global Development: Views from the Center » Blog Archive » The Illusion of Equality

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inequality education society interesting

15 Sep 09

Wired's Personal Scenario App

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future methodology gaming interesting

14 Sep 09

Participatory Design « Design for Service

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services design interesting tools participation research qualitative

peter jones systems thinking

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complexity design interesting

Dr. Collopy's article claims systems theory failed in its promise to enlarge the scope and practice of management, since it was not seriously taken up into management practice or what we might call the leadership imagination. He suggests this history poses learnable lessons for Design Thinking, a significant current trend in management theory and method, which appears to be taking up the coattails of systems thinking. A fundamental lesson from Collopy’s article might be to adopt methodological toolkits into practice and leave much of the theory for scholars.
As a design research consultant with years of experience in organizational
integration, I’ve seen gradual adoption of core design concepts such as total
customer experience, user-centricity, collaborative team design, and ethnographic
field research to inform early innovation.
8 more annotations...
- Dr. Collopy suggests we learn from history to prevent our current embrace
  of Design Thinking from suffering the same fate as systems thinking. He makes
  a case that classical systems thinking, as a management framework, failed in
  part due to problems with its significant cognitive overhead. As systems thinking
  has developed over the decades, it has accrued more concepts and enveloped
  more territory. It is not enough for any systems method to just present one
  good practice anymore.
- Russ
  Ackoff shares many stories of successful applications, but then his approaches
  (for example, Idealized Design) reformulate deep theory into simple working
  language and structures for action. He has participated in the front lines
  of organizational decision-making, unlike other systems theorists who step
  in and out of the arena of committed action. Ackoff’s approach is identified
  as a design for a reason. His school of systems thinking is explicitly framed
  as designing and I consider it the progenitor
  of today’s design thinking. Finally, Professor Ackoff also demonstrates the
  capability to think independently—to not be attached to the belief systems he
  himself may have constructed. I will add that systems or design 'thinking' must
  be dynamic processes, not just frameworks of ideas, to be considered thinking.
  We must free it up from the belief systems accrued from its theoretical development
  and (often limited) validation.
- Ackoff’s basic principles—such as starting from an ideal envisioned outcome and generate scenarios for reaching that vision—fit many of the practices espoused
  by firms such as IDEO, Jump, and Redesign Research. We may have dressed up the methodologies and supported them with design research, but design thinking is indebted more to systems thinkers than to traditional (industrial) designers. (Which may explain why design thinking is, unfortunately, rarely presented with the “designerly” richness it deserves).
- I believe
  the root cause of management fads is the propensity of working managers to
  convert a thoughtfully developed process to an instrumental method, in search
  of its most rapid (if not effective) deployment as a competitive weapon.
- According to naturalistic research on joint
  cognitive behavior (for example, Gary Klein’s research on decision making and
  Karl Weick’s sensemaking) leaders, people who regularly take decisive action
  in the face of emerging problems, engage situations as they unfold in real
  time. Observations from Schon’s (1983) Reflective Practitioner illustrate how managers “think on their feet” and the type of reflection we would consider
  thinking is tightly coupled with engagement in practice. The management practitioner
  does not typically refer to principles they learned in workshops, their engagement
  is direct and pertinent to the problem at hand. With no time for “thinking”
  or deep reflection, people lead from the basis of their personal experience,
  memories of similar situations, and personal repertoire of skills and tools.
- Design thinking is different from systems thinking, at least because the actions
  of designing that we draw the practice from are tangible ways of knowing and
  working. Designing is an action-first methodology (dialogue, prototyping) that
  people in business professions can witness and experience. Systems thinking
  is abstract in action and representation, and is a concept-first type of cognitive
  behavior. This is a bigger difference than we might believe. It is the difference
  between (abstract) belief and (embodied) knowing.
- The models and methods of systems thinking should be embraced and reformulated
  in locally designed tools for a networked world.
- For example, Fifth Discipline proponents could adopt visual reflection (sketching
  presentation) tools during ideation meetings to capture system relationships.
  Business ideas and innovation projects could be re-envisioned with visual sensemaking
  or small group scenario workshops.

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Novelist Douglas Coupland: the man who sees into the future | Books | The Guardian

…My heart’s in Accra » Wu Tang and a wider world

Putting people first » On using design to influence behaviour

The Art of With.pdf (application/pdf Object)

How to live off the grid

YouTube - Lift

Johnny Holland - It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive » Good IxDers borrow, great ones steal ….

FT.com / Books / Non-Fiction - People Like Us

Practical Access to Service Design.pdf (application/pdf Object)

After capitalism « Prospect Magazine

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William Dalrymple on the new generation of travel writers | Books | The Guardian

Global Development: Views from the Center » Blog Archive » The Illusion of Equality

Wired's Personal Scenario App

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peter jones systems thinking

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