TAGS and LINKS, combined with powerful search and storage, is a recent innovation. Clay Shirky talks about how digital is changing the way we categorize.


Directories -or- Tags & Links?
Browse -or- Search?
Planning -or- Emergence?

"It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?"

offloading -- it's *things* that make us smart.

"Our brains are modestly larger than the brains of our nearest relatives (although not larger than the brains of some dolphins and whales), but this is almost certainly not the source of our greater intelligence. The primary source, I want to suggest, is our habit of offloading as much as possible of our cognitive tasks into the environment itself - extruding our minds (that is, our mental projects and activities) into the surrounding world, where a host of peripheral devices we construct can stores, process, and re-represent our meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and protecting the processes of transformation that are our thinking. This widespread practice of off-loading releases us from the limitations of our animal brains." -Dan Dennet, Kinds of Minds: toward an understanding of consciousness

Or as Don Norman puts it "The power of the unaided mind is greatly exaggerated. It is "things" that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning."

Can anyone point me to other well-known or lesser-known ideas on this theme?

Learning? Yes, of course. Education? No thanks.

It's is a wonderful feeling when someone echoes your own thoughts so articulately. The title of Aaron Falbel's essay does just this. It's a short essay. You should read it. But I'll go ahead and summarize his suggestions for creating an social environment of learning.

(1) Don't discriminate against the formally uneducated
(2) Resist teaching when not asked - let children decide what they want to learn
(3) Don't discriminate against the uncertified when hiring - assess competence directly
(4) Create an open learning society - don't lock up knowledge in institutions, offer to share it with anyone who's committed to learn
(5) Outlaw exploitative labor NOT child labor - children learn from the world by participating in it
(6) Support libraries, museums, theatres, and other voluntary, non-coercive community institutions with activities for old and young alike
(7) "Finally, think up more ideas of your own! As a society that has been addicted to education for several generations, we have lost the ability to imagine what it might be like to grow up and live in a world free of pedagogical manipulation."

The one that happened to strike me the most was (4). Falbel says "Take on an apprentice. Hang a shingle outside your home describing what you do. Let your friends and neighbors know that you are making such an offer [ to share our skills (not impose) with others] to any serious and committed person." I rather like this notion. I get the feeling that Falbel isn't the biggest fan of the Internet and Information Technology, but hanging a "digital shingle" offering skills and cooperative pursuits of learning seems a powerful way of connecting people. While the current connections facilitated by the Internet today seem rather shallow and self-centered, there is a great potential for facilitating meaningful connections amongst people in the context of learning. There may be no one is my city that's interested in the obscure shit I want to learn or do, but there is likely to be someone on this planet who shares my particular interest at this moment in time.

Also Read:

Edutainment? No Thanks. I Prefer Playful Learning by Mitch Resnick

Growing Without Education by Aaron Falbel

Hard Fun by Seymour Papert

Human Power

Ivan Illich notes that "personal energy under personal control " is "the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people."

Here's an interview with Myriel Milicevic, the head of workshop that explores the potential of using the human body itself as a renewable power source. Some interesting ideas from the article:

+ It's not part of our logic anymore to power our own stuff ; sweating for making things work always had a rather undistinguished connotation
+ At the same time, there are those comforting imaginations about being completely self-sustaining, such as in case of disasters
+ And, human powered energy doesn't necessarily mean lifestyle changes (e.g. computer mouses powered by moving them around, floor panels that capture energy produced by walking)
+ Human powered objects themselves have a fascinating simplicity, it is easy to understand how to use them, which is a quality that often is lost in contemporary high-tech devices.

Is human-power a step backwards into the olden days?

On one hand, we can "passively" harness human energy, allowing to still be lazy and have things work for us. This can be viewed as a means to sustain a lifestyle which involves machines doing work for humans (consuming lots of energy in the process). This would include things like a watch that winds itself by harnessing the movements of our arm that we are going to do anyway.

On the other hand, we can actively engage human power as an end in itself.

Using Human-Powered Things: There is something desirable about self-sustaining artifacts, about intimately engaging with our things. We go to the gym or the park and exert ourselves physically, yet we drive 2 blocks to mail a letter. Surely, there many opportunities to merge human power as both a means and an end.

Designing Human-Powered Things: Myriel Milicevic, who headed the workshop, reminds us that "People can come up with very powerful and creative solutions even with very limited resources." In fact, people come up with very powerful and creative solutions because of limited resources; resources like personal energy under personal control, one of the few resources that is almost equally distributed among all people. I think they is great potential in a renewed enjoyment, as well as equity and sustainability, in designing personal things that we work with rather than things that simply work for us. Engaging human-power is, I think, an important aspect of engaging with our things as both means and ends.

I wonder also to what extent the pleasures and enjoyment of actively engaging human-power are dependent on it being a voluntary choice, an alternative choice to relying on machines and exterior energy sources. Do we need to have things available that work for us, so that can enjoy it when we instead choose to work with things?

"Don't become a well-rounded person.

Well rounded people are smooth and dull.
Become a thoroughly spiky person.
Grow spikes from every angle.
Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.
If you want to woo the
muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare.
Read Webster's revenge
plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle.
Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.
If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell,
read about convulsive religion,
read about voodoo and the Millerites
and the Munster Anabaptists.
There are hundreds of years of
extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants.
There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks.
Become the apotheosis of geek.
Learn who your spiritual ancestors were.
You didn't come here from nowhere.
There are reasons why you're here.
Learn those reasons.
Learn about the stuff that was buried
because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous."

-Bruce Sterling, The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

the most thoughtful thing I read today

was this insight

“... Cranbrook [Art and Design] students, almost all sons and daughters of the ‘First World,’ were not interested in addressing basic physical needs (mobility, clean water, uncontaminated food, shelter, sanitary services, and so on). Instead, most students chose to address perceived spiritual needs. Looking at their work one can only conclude that most of us in the West are starving for community and kindness, not for bread and water.”

from this entry from the slowBlog.

New Orleans, Louisiana (1)

the most exciting thing I read today was

this article by John Thackara, posted on worldchanging.com.


Thackara wonderfully captures that feeling that goes something like "This is all wrong... or am I just being crazy? What in the world can I possibly do?!" when we suddenly see flagrant behavior in something that is commonly perceived as harmless or even desirable.


Here are Thackara's 5 principles for addressing the design opportunities surrounding resource efficiency.

(i) it's more about discovery than blue sky invention
(ii) it's less about control, more about the devolution of power
(iii) it does not have to think BIG or act BIG to be effective
(iv) replace physical resources with information
(v) use whole systems thinking

This is my favorite part:

Many of the answers we need already exist. We need to become global hunter-gatherers of models, processes, and ways of living that have been learned by other societies, over time. We have to find those examples. Adapt them. Recombine them.

For example, a lot of people already know how to live more lightly than we do. Hundreds of millions of poor people practise advanced resource efficiency every day of their lives. That’s because they are too poor to waste resources like we rich folk do.

Design schools should relocate en masse to favelas and slums. These informal economies are sites of intense social and business innovation.

Munich, Germany

Tübingen, Germany