("JP")

As soon as you start down the slippery slope of doing things based on convention, you are diluting your independence and uniqueness, which is to say your reason for existing. Even the smallest things can start to bend you toward conformity.

Within a larger, and more political, point in his column, George Will explains something about structuring systems so as to “nudge” people toward a particular behavior pattern, without mandating anything: George F. Will: Nudge Against the Fudge

Such is the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’

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In a class called Social Software, which I taught last fall, the students worked in small groups to design and launch software to support some form of group interaction. To anchor the class, I required that whatever project they came up with be used by other ITP students. This first order benefits of this strategy were simple: the designers came... See more

The flat layout of the building made for constant chance encounters in the hallways. Vertical buildings create rigid boundaries, since floors and stairs are harder barriers, so the horizontal footprint caused people to run into dozens of others throughout a typical day. From the air, it looked like an oblique letter E (with a little extra E), and... See more

But nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly. Leaves change more quickly than tress, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes faster than climate. It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order

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In the midst of the unfolding crisis with work – a fundamentally spiritual problem – it seems to me that we desperately need new cultural metaphors to describe labour. What, actually, is this thing called “work”? Why do we do it? What does it afford us? What can’t it afford us?

For now, I find solace in the metaphor of work as trace. In a world... See more