hi

what I've been up to since IDEO

(a mixture of personal and ~✨Public Science✨~ work)

If we can extract highlights from the comments for a given article, we can present them as a summary of reaction towards a piece and the popular perspectives which are represented, quantifying the support for each. Readers can use this to orient themselves in the discussion around an article very quickly and immediately identify sub-conversations they can be a part of.

other coral experiments

notebook

The sage says:
I do not know its name.
It is the mother of the world.

The sage does not claim the teacher of the state by losing the state.
It is the best way to be in the world with the country.
The Tao of heaven is soft and weak, and the people will protect them.

The Tao is like the world of the form of the world.
It is the master of all things, which is the mother of all things.
The Tao of heaven is everlasting and intelligent and failure.
It is the mother of the world.
The sage does not fail to fail to be seen.

Humans of Simulated New York (w/ Fei Liu)

Wicked problems

difficult to agree on the problem (or whether there's a problem at all)
there is no comprehensive perspective
wicked problems are interconnected
no way to verify or experiment solutions
there may be (very) delayed feedback loops
every wicked problem is unique
are nonlinear (outputs are disproportionate to the inputs)
they are massive & intimidating

Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169.

key question:

how do you make sense of nauseatingly complex systems?

The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch

cognitive mapping

a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole (Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson)

alienation

an inability to cognitively map the mechanisms and contours of the world system is as debilitating politically as being unable to mentally map a city would be for a city dweller. (Jeff Kinkle, referring to Fredric Jameson)

"crisis of representation"

"representational breakdown"

one method: networks

Bureau d´ Études' An Atlas of Agendas

Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics

another method: narratives

Cartographies of the Absolute (Jeff Kinkle, Alberto Toscano)

[Marain] appeal[s] to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike

Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life

Arrival (2016)

Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems):

there is a problem in discussing systems only with words. Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once.

... Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once.

what we want in a new representational language: