Digging into Regenerative Principles
I just came across some notes I made from Nesta’s first Minister for the Future event back in June, which was on Food for the Future and the potential of regenerative agriculture. The original essay on the topic was written…
Futures: The Unit of Delivery is Action
I remember this from the early days of GDS permeating its way across the UK digital culture and beyond; The Team is the Unit of Delivery. Getting a group of good people well working together towards well considered outcomes. In…
WeWork… never worked
This started as an aside on LinkedIn, but in the comments more stories started turning up, so capturing here for posterity. ——- WeWork has filed for bankrupt (FT). Quite some going for a company Ince valued at $47 billion. An…
Resurrecting web marginalia
I’ve just spent a few minutes with Stephen Anderson’s reflections on the Mighty Mind community experiment on Circle (which, as a platform… kinda sucks). Stephen wondered if the thing he actually wanted didn’t quite exist, and in amongst ideas threw…
It helps open things out
We launched Where The Light Gets In, a regenerative design field kit, last week in the Artefact Shop. It’s gone really well, driven in a good part by a LinkedIn post. Once upon a time, that would have been Twitter,…
Mystery Thumbs and Feature Debt
On video calls recently, I’ve been confused by a mystery thumb reaction which appears above my head at the mere glance of a thumb, like in the picture above. Was it a Zoom thing? Or an Opal Camera thing? Whenever…
Obliquiscopes: setting aperture for reality
I just realised that this thing, the frame, the viewer, the [enter other casually used descriptor] has never really had one particular name. What is it? Well, it’s an Obliquiscope. I’ve previously used the word to define a process, which…
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Towards a regenerative design toolkit
I have been working on a side project in the moments where I get the chance; a regenerative design toolkit called Where the light gets in. It’s a corruption of the Leonard Cohen lyric “There are cracks in everything, that’s…
The Crisis of Discovery
Sometimes a phrase pops. You drop everything, because those words suddenly make the world make more sense; the background interference that’s been nagging at your subconscious resolves to something more intelligible. Today, it’s this from Robin Sloan’s newsletter: “Where the…
How to play Mundane Superhero
I was writing up a longer blog post, reflecting on the recent Innovation and Future Thinking course which Toban Shadlyn and I ran last month, and I wanted to quickly nod to Mundane Superhero. It’s a workshop warmup game I…
Testing the Community Power Compass
A year or so after first writing about the Community Power Compass, I was invited by Val Elefante to deliver a seminar on it for The Metagovernance Project this week. Metagov (for short) is an interdisciplinary research collective looking at…
How to rewild a new garden
You may be thinking you’ve stumbled into the wrong blog. And I can understand why. Smithery is a strategic design practice, which admittedly encompasses many things. But never gardens. What follows, however, is a documentation of our personal experience of…
Exploring Regenerative Triangulation
I started articulating some thoughts in the last newsletter about a triad, in the fashion of fragile–robust–antifragile (from Taleb’s 2012 book) , which contained the states of unsustainable, sustainable and regenerative. The main thing bugging me was that making something…
Artefact 234 – Your Letters
I sent out the latest edition of the Artefacts newsletter earlier this week, 3000+ words on a variety of things. Interestingly, various people got in touch with contributions, thoughts, questions, and more, but all via different platforms. There was no…
I can’t believe there’s no butter
Well, not no butter. But certainly less than you’d expect. Another example of what producers are having to do in the face of ever-rising input costs. The wrappers are probably long paid for in bulk. The boxes they’re packed into…