I’m two and a bit weeks out of the third surgery on my leg. The thing has come to dominate almost 16 months of my life now. The recovery is going well. I’m largely off painkillers. However my movement is highly restricted. I’m not allowed to put weight through it yet so am not leaving the house or doing much. The novelty of my enforced recognisance is wearing off. I played Dredge (6.5/10), caught up on the last four series of Doctor Who and am now in the opening bits of Octopath Traveller which, true to JRPG style features an overload of exposition at the beginning which is trying my patience. Beautiful looking thing though.
My lack of mobility will continue until at least second or third week of January. If the graft looks like it’s healing up at that point then I may be able to start putting weight on, getting more mobile and finally seeing what’s been happening in the world. It’s amazing how quickly things slip when you’re not really talking to anyone except a two year old. A friend and colleague visited yesterday and I couldn’t remember like three or four different words and names of people. I’ve started to come back to sit at my desk but not really doing any thinking or ‘work.’ So this first post in a few weeks is more a listicle than original content from newsletters and emails I’ve sent myself.
Short Stuff
The combination of fears about AI, the tech jobs squeeze and the reality of global collapse seems to have spurned a renaissance of people writing mea culpa’s for their domain followed by calling for critical practice:
- Further to my last post (all that time ago) about signals on how mainstream design might be changing (a recognition that ‘design thinking’ didn’t work or Is Bad), a piece on the new d.school curriculum which is like a pedagogic mea culpa. If you read this as a design educator you will find it hard not to exclaim; ‘but we’ve been doing this for a decade!’ Stanford finally catching up with the rest of the world. It’s worth remembering that d.school comes from a an engineering background, not art, which is probably why, as in the previous link, criticality feels so new.
- Simultaneously, at another part of Stanford, a paper on why design thinking has failed and a call for more criticality in design which connects to a whole raft of interesting ‘hey guys what about if we question the underlying assumptions behind social needs’ from:
- Developers, who need to think about what they’re for in AI. E.g. more and more evidence that critical, creative skills are where the gap is.
- And engineers, who (gasp) should rethink what ‘needs’ (speed/power) they’re addressing before designing solutions.
- I actually like the Humane pin. I watched the whole video and was pretty impressed; there’s a lot of smart design stuff there. Some of it, like the laser interface feels quite sophisticated and developed and I can imagine those advancing quite quick; with colour, more complex gestures etc. And the idea of ending apps and moving past them, equally sensical. Some of it, like the ‘trust light’ feels clunky and a bit slap-dash. Still feels like the technology and the worldbuilding isn’t there to make a case for these things beyond evangelists (see also Google Glasses).
- Seeing a lot of parallels between my current experience and Alex’s reflection of her new role here. A) Designers are difficult to manage because they’ve been trained to question everything, including your own design skills. B) No one really teaches (our generation of) designers how to be managers. C) At a certain point you just have to accept that you don’t get to make anything any more and your role is to support other people in making things.
- Article on how the Barnum effect might prove very dangerous for astrology app users. E.g. If ChatGPT tells you there are no African countries beginning with ‘K’ you can factually disregard it, if an astrology app tells you to break up with your partner because your aries is in sigma or whatever, you’re already pre-disposed to start believing it.
- A title like ‘Nobody Wants Their Job To Rule Their Lives Anymore‘ implies that there was a point at which people did and that there was a humanity wide shift quite recently. The detail is that it’s ‘43% of surveyed’ British people. Interesting though.
- UN Global Pulse report on the need for creativity and imagination in transformation.
- Venkatash Rao on AI as a camera not an engine. This is similar to the idea of it as a nooscope (a machine for extracting knowledge) which I love and comes as a rebuke of the idea of it as an ‘imagination engine.’
- David Karpf’s very good summary of WIRED’s 30th anniversary.
- Paris Marx’s long-awaited review of Andresson’s puerile screed. He’s also written about the EU Ai act which I need to get my head round when I can.
- A list of surveys and studies on the popularity of post-capitalism and post-growth ideas.
- Thanks Kane and Goatley for the Tiramisu World Cup.
Next week I might do a year-in-review like we all used to do. Bom-bom-bom critical practice, bom-bom-bom critical practice. (That’s what I would have been saying at work all week had I been at work, but I feel like those articles are doing the lifting for me.)
Ok, love you, bye.