("JP")

“Sense of place – the way we perceive places such as streets, communities, cities or ecoregions – influences our well-being, how we describe and interact with a place, what we value in a place, our respect for ecosystems and other species, how we perceive the affordances of a place, our desire to build more sustainable and just communities, and how... See more

Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”

The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here... See more

What kind of interface could enable people to collectively learn and build knowledge as a group? I'm trying to imagine a system that goes beyond forums and linear discussion threads, with highlights and summarization to distill key ideas [design thread]

I think a large part of why we’re so unhappy with our digital spaces is that the people designing them don’t really see themselves as urban planners. It’s a metaphor that occasionally floats around without much acknowledgment that it has altogether ceased to be a metaphor .

If designers, product managers and engineers are really digital urban... See more

In investing, higher volatility usually equates to higher possible returns. In today’s world of online expression, we settle for lower expected value, market-level outcomes so as to not ruffle any feathers and not take any outsized risk. We’re basically hoping to allow people to know us enough so that they include us in their passive index of... See more

Instead of trying to shape the map to look like the territory, they tried to make the territory look like the map.