aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
The math is simple: more people are consuming more of everything than ever before, but there are very few hits of real scale. That means that many of us spend our time in niches, not in the center.
Variety and the long tail
When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
New Media is opinionated about the internet’s infinite scale . It chooses to reject or play with the internet’s scale, opting to be handmade, limited quantity, or geared towards small groups of people who actively choose to receive it. New Media is not something to be fished from a stream, but a sacred pilgrimage one may embark upon.
Yancey Strickler • Formulary for New Media
We often assume that the world of today would stun a visitor from fifty years ago. In truth, for every miraculous iPad there are countless partly broken realities: WiFi passwords, connectivity, battery life, privacy and compatibility amongst others. The real skill of creating a compelling and engaging view of the future lies not in designing the... See more
Nick Foster • The Future Mundane - Core77
The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories. The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
“Beauty is the mystery of life. It’s not in the eye, it’s in the mind—and it’s because of awareness of perfection in the mind. As a matter of fact, I think that we see perfection and then we see beauty, you know, that they’re different. Like I see a, I look down a valley and I think, it’s just perfect. Perfection is easier to see than beauty. You
... See moreThe designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping
... See moreKevin Slavin • Design as Participation
I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make. Daniel Dennett had a great riff on this– he recommended being a connoisseur of one’s mistakes.