Cognitive Debt – Smithery
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts| Smithery
Calling Arno Penzias I want to talk about Arnos Penzias and his idea about the Surface Area of an organisation. I’ve been an EE (“Everything Everywhere”) customer for years now. I was an Orange customer before that, so just drifted over in the rebrand. I probably stayed because of inertia, but an inertia rooted in […] The post Organisational Surface Area appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I received a really interesting email from Radko Kovachev at the Institute for Circular Economy in Bulgaria, asking about how to apply the Regenerative Design Field Kit which they had bought to a fascinating project they are working on. Rather than just email back, we agreed to put this up as blog post, so others […] The post Creating place-based regenerative explorations appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts| Smithery
Ten years ago, I came across this story online – somebody had rescued six large reading desks from the demolition of Birmingham Central Library. And that person lived locally to me down in Sussex. I arranged to get two; one for me, and one for Carlo too. For about seven years or so, I used […] The post A new home for an old desk appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Last month, I ran a ‘workshop about workshops’ for the good folks in Nesta’s Discovery Team. We played the world’s best warm-up game of Mundane Superhero, through the core theory of Information as Light, not Liquid, some hands-on mapping and clustering, a spot of LEGO Empathy Mapping, and more besides. In a way, it was […] The post Kaleidoscopes – Mechanisms for Meaningful Meetings appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
Back in summer 2023, I wrote a post on an idea I’d had called Regenerative Triangulation. It was the first time I’d expressed it publicly, yet Lizzie Shupak asked me nearly immediately to do a talk on it as part of a London Climate Action Week thing she was hosting at the RSA. And from […] The post An introduction to Regenerative Triangulation appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I am running a one-off elective, called Design Innovation: Venture Creation as part of the Design Futures programme at The Royal College of Art over the next nine weeks. I wanted to set out a particular angle on this elective, to push further into the sort of ventures we need more of in future. This […] The post Design Innovation: Venture Creation appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
I’ve been using Bluesky quite a bit, now that I’ve deleted Twitter. And trying out what it’s like to craft micro explorations there. The following was a series of five ‘skeets’ (no, seriously, let’s not call them that), that I thought was worth sharing here too. A thing @nicksherrard.bsky.social said this morning has been nagging me. “Maybe we’ll just […] The post Writing in the age of AI appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
A few weeks back, I was invited to be a critical friend on a futures project by Paul Graham Raven & Keri Facer. The artefact in the centre, the central vehicle to invite people into this world, was a newspaper. Newspapers are, of course, a brilliant container for giving people just enough context of a […] The post The Malkovich Principle appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
‘Today’s vibe’ …is a thing I’ve done on LinkedIn for a while. It’s usually a passage I have read previously which chimes with the general feeling in the air today. That can be a resonance with work, exploration, circumstances or whatever. But the feeling today is… well, actually, I’m not going to go there. Because […] The post Where the work is appeared first on Smithery.| Smithery
