In addition to the number of frameworks and ideas, and the density of the interconnections among them, there was a strong normative quality to the material and its presentation. “If one hopes to make any progress at all,” we were told, “you need to both understand and accept these related ideas.”

This particular version of systems thinking is not unusual in this respect. Peter Senge’s 1990 edition of The Fifth Discipline describes one manager’s reaction to a five-day introductory workshop on his approach, which among other things, requires growing comfortable with eight archetypes: “It reminds me of when I first studied calculus (p. x).” Systems dynamics, the Soft Systems Method and other approaches face similar concerns.

Each of systems thinking’s various manifestations demands some degree of subscription to an orthodoxy (a particular view of just what systems thinking is). And each requires that the user master a large number of related ideas and techniques, most of which are not particularly useful on their own.

Fast Company: Lessons Learned — Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking

(Thanks James Curcio)

See also:

John Kay’s work on obliquity, which critiques decision science.

(Photo credit: Gutter / CC)

Shapeways has a round-up of evolutionary, algorithmic & generative design projects, including the “cellular bowl” above, designed with Processing.

The marriage of tech and design is all around us. In a world where everything is designed a meta “way to design” that algorithmically cuts through the clutter is very appealing. A perfect design algorithm could potentially engender choice in design the same way that Google’s PageRank set of algorithms do for the web. And this is what generative design already partially does. It simplifies design by codifying it and somewhere within lies the promise of “true”, “simple” & “beautiful” design.

With technologies such as 3D printing letting everyone design or co-design things there is also a real need for generative tools. They allow for unique designs but since each is machine made, the marriage is a conceptually comfortable and inexpensive one. Also, rather than forcing the customer into a “blank canvas conundrum” whereby the sheer possibility overwhelms them to the point inactivity, generated models could lead to choice or guided choice in design.

Shapeways: Dasign: data driven, evolutionary, algorithmic & generative design

(via Bruce Sterling)

New Scientist has a fascinating article on the way the color red effects our minds. Definitely worth reading in full.

IMAGINE you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn’t.

Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round. The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769). “If one competitor is strong and the other weak, it won’t change the outcome of the fight,” says Norbert Hagemann, who led the study. “But the closer the levels, the easier it is for the colour to tip the scale.”

This is just the latest piece of research suggesting that exposure to certain colours can have a significant effect on how people think and act. Up to now most of the research has focused on red clothing in sport, but other colours and settings are being investigated too. It is becoming clear that colours can have an important, unappreciated effect on the way your mind works – one that you really ought to know about.

New Scientist: Winners wear red: How colour twists your mind

(via Overcoming Bias)

(Toru Kogure (photographer), Takashi Tanabe (designer), ‘New Face’ editorial for Fashion News, early 80s)

(Tsunehisa Kimura, 1968, commercial and industrial photography)

More Pics: A Journey Around My Skull

The wind turbine has become an instantly recognizable symbol for “green energy” (and for green washing). But here are 10 examples of turbines that are turning the iconic design on its head.

Popular Mechanics:

(via OVO)

Jakob Nielsen’s organization investigates the usability of non-profit online donation systems, and concludes: ”
User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations’ website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions.”

In choosing between 2 charities, people referred to 5 categories of information. However, an organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work was by far the most important. Indeed, it was 3.6 times as important as the runner-up issue, which was the organization’s presence in the user’s own community.

(Information about how organizations used donations did impact decision-making, but it was far down the list relative to its second-place ranking among things that people claimed that they’d be looking for.)

People want to know what a non-profit stands for, because they want to contribute to causes that share their ideals and values. Most people probably agree that, for example, it’s good to help impoverished residents of developing countries or patients suffering from nasty diseases. Many organizations claim to do these very things. The question in a potential donor’s mind is how the organization proposes to help. Often, sites we studied failed to answer this question clearly — and lost out on donations as a result.

Full Story: UseIt

(via Social Design Notes)

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I HATE CAPTCHAs. I’ve sworn never to use them for years now. I guess it falls in line with my politics – I refuse to treat all commenters like spammers. I use Askimet here, and even it eats legitimate comments once in a while. But at least it’s invisible to users – no need to make everyone pass a Turing Test to do anything.

Vidoop’s new CAPTCHA system, pictured above, is atrocious. They advertise it as “computer proof but not human proof.” It stands as a perfect example of what I hate: increasingly difficult hoops for customers to jump through to use a product or service. I get a headache just thinking about the possibility that one day I might have to take tests like this one every single time I sign-up to try a new web service, participate in an online discussion, or even leave feedback or ask for support from a service I pay for.

Even if it turns out to be easier than deciphering and correctly typing blurry numbers and letters, I worry that it may in fact be, on occasion, human proof.

Let’s look at their demo. Which ones is “castles”? It must be S, even though that doesn’t look like a castle to me. In this case, there’s nothing else that seems to qualify so it should work out. But assuming they’re putting one of their best examples forward as a demo, what do their less-than-best ones look like? Is there really no chance that sometimes it might be a little confusing which picture they want? Especially for people who aren’t native English speakers.

Designers & developers: your job is to decrease the number of annoyances in people’s lives, not increase them. Your job is not to keep spammers out, it’s to keep customers in.

Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.

Alfred serves as a reminder to the rest of us, that simple is often better, just because it works. The lack of electricity never throws him off. The lack of funding means he’s creative in ways that he recruits people from around the city and country to report news to him. He uses his cell phone as the major point of connection between him and the 10,000 (he says) that read his blackboard daily.

Full Story: AfriGadget

(via Ethan Zuckerman)

Repairing is the new recycling:

More repair movement stuff: Platform 21

(via Arthur)

Max’s original idea was developed as a scale model with the materials he had on hand. Plastic grocery bags from the kitchen cabinet and coat hangers from his closet were the trash that came together to make a structure influenced by the building styles of Mongolian yurts. Working with the crew from Continuum, he was able to use and develop techniques to build a full size model of his dome. The resulting dome is based on the work of R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome, but they came up with a relatively new technique of making each panel a cell, rather than using the often used hub and spoke design. For the sheathing material, they used thick plastic sealed at the edges with a heat strip. The center of the panels is filled with packing peanuts, making for a very well insulated structure.Max’s original idea was developed as a scale model with the materials he had on hand. Plastic grocery bags from the kitchen cabinet and coat hangers from his closet were the trash that came together to make a structure influenced by the building styles of Mongolian yurts. Working with the crew from Continuum, he was able to use and develop techniques to build a full size model of his dome. The resulting dome is based on the work of R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome, but they came up with a relatively new technique of making each panel a cell, rather than using the often used hub and spoke design. For the sheathing material, they used thick plastic sealed at the edges with a heat strip. The center of the panels is filled with packing peanuts, making for a very well insulated structure.

Full Story: MAKE

(via OVO)

The New York Times has a very nice “article skimmer” prototype up. Basically, it’s an easy to scan grid of each major section of the news paper.

Newspaper and magazine web sites are notoriously bad at designing readable front pages, so this is a welcome alternative.

(via Steven Walling)

Ethan Zuckerman wrote about the problem of the NYT’s online front page here.

Related External Links

• Generated by LinkCurl
• New York Times releases newspaper-like “article skimmer”
• The Presurfer: New York Times Article Skimmer
• Tech-Ex: New York Times Online "Unfolds" With an Article Skimmer

As part of the documentary Ants! Nature’s Secret Power, cement was poured into an ant colony, allowed to harden, and then excavated to reveal an amazing metropolis:

Design by Superorganism

Check out the end of the video for to reveal an ant project equivalent to the Great Wall of China.   Could this be a model for producing emergent structures with nanotechnology?

I’ve got to admit, though, as more than one person has commented on various blogs, what they did in this video really sucks for the ants.Sorta like if giant aliens filled all the buildings in Manhattan with super alien epoxy and made a mold while recording the whole thing…which could make a great movie!! Mutual of Alpha Centauri’s Wild Kingdom. “Now, as you can see when we move in among these structures, these small creatures begin moving in all directions, probably as a strategy to confuse predators. My assistant, Snrblxx, will now start pumping in the quick setting polymer gel.”

I want this one:

(via Once Upon a Geek)

Dan Hill provides an excellent summary of The Black Swan and includes a few excepts specifically useful to designers and urban planners.

This is a book that I almost didn’t read. Like The Long Tail or Here Comes Everybody, for instance. Both books I own but don’t feel the need to read, feeling that I’ve already having experienced much of what lies inside. This betrays my own arrogance I suppose, and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed a few profound insights this way. But given the choice I prefer to read about things I don’t know, books that don’t promise to back up my existing ideas. Then there are those like Gladwell’s Blink or The Tipping Point, books whose title more or less says it all. A quick rifle through the pages of these books in an airport bookshop – in that peculiar pre-flight mode of having no time and time on your hands – is enough to get the gist, and speculate as to their point.

The Black Swan almost fell into this category, but a recommendation by Paul Schütze and a few others meant that I did pick it up – at Melbourne Airport, ironically – and consumed it voraciously.

It’s not so much a popular science book as a popular statistics book, not a genre I would’ve thought probable to emerge, and thus something of a black swan in itself.

Full Story: City of Sound.

Another good overview can be found by reading The Telegraph’s interview with Taleb

It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 (“in the afternoon, as I recall”) that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the world’s poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his head.

What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable – to offer glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2020.

Full Story: The Guardian

(via OVO)

Meeting more people

This one’s simple: meet more people in the real world. Attend more conferences, unconferences, and meetups. I know of no better way than “networking” (however crass that sounds) to find jobs, collaborators, business partners, romantic partners, customers, clients, etc. etc. In increasingly precarious times, having strong networks has never been more important.

Indoor gardening

I have no illusions about getting “off the grid” but I do want to substantially supplement my diet with homegrown food. Given that during WWII 40% of all vegtables eaten were grown at home, I think it’s reasonable to think that gardening will be a key part of our food security moving forward into the recession.

My partner and I have access to outdoor gardening space at our apartment building, and live about 3 blocks from a community garden. But since we’re planning on moving (and obviously we missed planting season) we’re planning on starting with a small indoor hydroponic system, probably an EarthBox (or maybe a DIY EarthBox) with an LED grow light. Also, I just ordered the Espresso Oyster Mushroom Patch from Fungi Perfecti. I’ll be sharing my results and experiences with the process.

Excercise & ergonomics

Your health is probably the most sound investment you can make at this point. I’d done a decent job of keeping in shape in recent years until 2008, but I totally fell off this year. My partner and I have been doing vinyasa yoga at home lately, and I plan on keeping up with this. More walking and biking is also mandatory.

I’m also dedicating myself to learning up on ergonomics. Bruce Sterling has a good rant on the subject here, but doesn’t fully drive home the health angle. Most of you reading this are probably destroying your eyes and back right now. Hell, I’m screwing myself up writing this. This must stop.

Start using local currency

I’ve been fascinated with local currency for some time, but have never actually used it. It’s about time I signed up for Cascadia Hour Exchange.

Committing to solving global problems

Perhaps the best way to protect oneself against the global problems we face is to solve the problems. Thus, I am committing myself to converting all my experience to the highest advantage of others. So from now on, everything I do will revolve around a couple simple questions: does this benefit humanity and if not, how can it?

The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke — aside from the fact I thought it was funny — is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense…I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.

In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I’m kind of confused why they’d take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page — it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that’s awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.

Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome // Skilluminati Research.

This is too cool not to share. From Dutch designer Tim Smit, made of stylish neoprene and strategically lined with body molded kevlar, this runway show stopper will be the must have accessory for your next war, skirmish, struggle, conflict, combat zone or civil strife you find yourself in or starting. Aeon Flux eat your heart out.

More pics via Yanko Design.

Another one for today. Can’t get much better than this! xo
Kudos to agency 72andSunny and creative director Glenn Cole for this inspirational piece of advertising.

Amazing what a power a positive note can have on one’s day. When’s the last time you made a stranger feel this way?

Kevin at Grinding looks at the connection between a new study on corporate logos and the connection to sigil magic:

The team conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

“This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways,” said Gr?inne Fitzsimons. “We’ve performed tests where we’ve offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior.”

Other than their defined brand personalities, the researchers argue there is not anything unusual about Apple and IBM that causes this effect. The team conducted a follow-up experiment using the Disney and E! Channel brands, and found that participants primed with the Disney Channel logo subsequently behaved much more honestly than those who saw the E! Channel logos.

Full Story: Grinding.

See also:

Marketing Without Tears.

Wikipedia: Priming.

Reminds me of something a designer acquaintance of mine, Melncoly, is fond of saying:
"Be yourself and you will always be in fashion.”

In an attempt to shake off a major case of cabin fever, I went to my local botanic gardens to take a walk. In their exhibition building was a pictoral showing of “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” created by renown architect Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. This is an amazing piece of work and I was blown away with it’s concept and design.

“This book tells the story of one of the most original and important gardens of the 21st century, created by the internationally celebrated architectural critic and designer Charles Jencks. He and his late wife started working on a landscape, that, after her death in 1995, continued to grow into a larger project, an ongoing speculation on the basic elements of nature. Covering thirty acres in the Borders area of Scotland, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is conceived as a place to explore certain fundamental aspects of the universe.

What are atoms made of and how should we conceive of them? How does DNA make up a living organism and why is it essential to celebrate it in a garden? In dialogue with eminent physicists, cosmologists, and biologists, including Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, and Steven Rose, Charles Jencks has created a series of new, expansive, visual metaphors that challenge misleading and frequently misunderstood concepts, such as the ‘Big Bang’ and the ‘Selfish Gene.’

(Preview of the book “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Google Books)

(Charles Jencks website. Article on “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Recreating Eden)

Future by Design web site.

(Thanks Danny!)

Irreality webmaster Squink launched a new gadget blog called the Shiny Report. Here’s his critique of the business model of a new “ecologically friendly” cell phone company:

Every now and then, a conceptual design company comes up with a really fantastic idea – and then you read it and realise that somehow, against all odds, they actually missed the mark. One latest example of this is Kaleidoscope, who did exactly this. I will explain why momentarily, but first, let’s take a quick look at their angle.

The LINC phone is an eco-friendly cellphone, which is leased to the user on a yearly basis. Once a year, the distributor of the LINC posts out a brand new LINC phone to the user. In exchange for this, the user is to then somehow (either through mail – eugh, or walk-in LINC stores) return the old LINC model to the distributor. The distributor then sends the phone back to the plant, where it is recycled and it’s components are harvested for use in other units.

The LINC model is designed to “[change] the entire paradigm of the production and consumption model”, and eliminate large amounts of hazardous waste material from the phone industry. The user (read: not owner) of the LINC phone can also log into the LINC website and get a warm fuzzy feeling about how eco-friendly they are.

This in itself is a reasonably good idea. But let’s face it, it’s not the primary reason you’d want a LINC phone. In actual fact, who wants to LEASE a phone from a distributor? Answer: nobody. That said, the phone itself is constructed of modular, environmentally-conscious components. Remove the leasing agreement and you’re left with something that almost constitutes a better idea: an eco-friendly, modular phone.

This is where the ‘obvious good idea’ comes into play.

Your eco-friendly, modular LINC phone can be disassembled and upgraded with new modular components. Take your LINC phone to the nearest LINC retailer, or order LINC components online. As new technologies and standards are introduced, simply upgrade your phone for a nominal fee. And you can still save the environment by handing your old components over to LINC to be re-harvested in exchange for future upgrade-credits (assuming you haven’t sold them on, or given them to a friend).

Original story (with more pics).

Marketing Without Tears
A quick and dirty self-study course in marketing

This guide is designed people wanting to jump start a study of the occult arts collectively known as marketing. I hope to provide a set of cognitive tools useful for citizens, consumers, occultists, reality hackers, philosophers, activists, and business people alike.

In this case I’m using the term ‘marketing’ to refer to all the various communications disciplines applied by organizations of all types for the purpose of encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors (eg, companies wish to encourage the purchase of products, governments wish to discourage revolution).

If you want to study marketing, there’s no reason to keep your head buried in books. Most of us are surrounded by marketing. We can look at the world around us and find examples nearly everywhere we look. All we need to begin a study of the material is to learn how to analyze it.

There’s no reason you can’t begin this immediately. However, the following three books will be helpful in learning to analyze the marketing sphere.

PR!: A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen: This could almost be titled ‘The true history and secrets of the illuminati.’ This is a history of the practice of public relations and the discipline’s impact on society. Much of it is centers around the career of Edward Bernays, who provides many insights into the workings of corporations.

Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say: Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent overview of applied communications diciplines.

Savage Girl: a novel by Alex Shakar. Shakar deconstructs marketing and consumer culture (with a possible Deleuzian influence) with remarkable clarity, and tells one hell of a story. Pattern Recognition pales compared to this book.

One of Shakar’s own ideas presented in the novel is ‘paradessense,’ or paradoxical essense. For example, ice cream is both innocent and erotic. Coffee promises to be both stimulating and relaxing.

Reading these books and then spending the following months and years paying close attention to the marketing around you won’t necessarily substitute for taking real courses in marketing, or spending time working at marketing firm. But it’s an excellent way for a thoughtful person without much time to glean an understanding of the forces at work around them.

Further reading:

These two books on graphic design will illuminate your perspective of the visual components marketing materials:

Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams: A crash course in the fundamentals of graphic design. Once you’ve read this book, starting paying attention to the design of everything around you, as related to the principals in this book. Traffic signs, menus, pens, packaging, everything. What principals were applied in the design of these things? How could the design be improved?

Grid Systems in Graphic Design: This is essential reading on graphic design, if you can find a copy. This works at a much more structural level than Non-Designer’s, and will give you an even better reference point when analyzing design. I posted some brief notes on this book here.

For those interested in some practical marketing advice for small business owners, I’d recommend Guerilla Marketing Handbook and How to Market a Product for Under $500, but they’re a little out of date. Newer books in the Guerrilla Marketing series are probably more up to date, and their web site is useful.

Klintron formerly served as the marketing director for a successful health care start-up, and sometimes writes about marketing on his blog Klintron’s Brain.

This article originally appeared on Key 64.