A friend sent me a rather wonderful description of an ideal future – one where we knew how to live well on the planet, at ease with each other and our reality, with the positive aspects of incredible technology incorporated and wisely integrated into our humanity – in short, a vision.
And I reacted against it. Certainly not in terms of the spirit, and not in terms of much of the detail. But because of the detail.
Continue reading “On vision, path-dependency, agility – and bears.”
Raoul Vaneigem said;
Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
But he wrote this before the internet existed. Today, we might add ;
… and is only discoverable by those with excellent search skills and a willingness to plough through endless irrelevance.
Finding information that meets your needs, is written in a language you understand, on the basis of assumed knowledge that you already possess is not at all easy – despite the cornucopia that is the internet. Or is it, because of the cornucopia…?
The problem applies in reverse for producers of content. How will your (my!) little gem of insight ever be seen by more than a few?
Continue reading “Discoverability, the semantic web and the power of patterns”
Why? Why am I doing this? In a sense, it would seem as if I’m abandoning what people who have known me for a while would say was more a vocation than a career in architecture.
In fact, I see it as a way of satisfying the same drive by other means. For some architects, and I’m certainly one, the attraction of architectural work is that it allows you to first imagine and then make new bits of the world that work better – that are more beautiful, more humane, more efficient.
The world of digital technology offers these same possibilities but significantly, it allows the solutions to be unchained from the weight and drag of the physical world – offers scalability, ubiquity, relevance, impact beyond that of any but the most iconic of buildings.
More than that, the digital world is new, uncharted – the space of the unexplored and even the unimagined is so much larger than the territory that has been mapped out, and unlike the real-world, this is a multi-dimensional, self-referential space, where each new invention can spawn whole universes of implied possibility.
It seems trite and trivial to say it, but I am convinced that we are merely in the low foothills of what a digital culture that includes the vast bulk of humanity will offer.
OK, so the primary purpose of my venture into the world of tech is to become a part of it. I am confident of the skills, creativity and work ethic I have to offer, but somewhat short on substantive CV matter. In the long term, this blog will hopefully serve as some part of a distributed resume – an aspect of a career bootstrap process.
One plank of this will be to publish project proposals – ideas for ventures of various kinds, more or less deeply considered – to give a flavour of the way I think, the areas I’m interested in, the thought processes I use.
Going public with ideas is an interesting undertaking – taking us straight to the heart of one of the startup dilemmas – are our ideas so precious (my precious…) that we need to keep them secret until we can unveil them in glory (or at least as an MVP), or is the need to find collaborators, to develop traction, so important that it requires us to come out in the open?
Digital Anthropology 