Category: innovation
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Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt
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I have been thinking a lot recently about Cognitive Debt from one particular perspective; often the need for ‘thinking’ is not being replaced, but instead just reshaped and pushed elsewhere in a system. Recap: I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers”.…
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Shearing layers and square metres
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Workplace Design shouldn’t be a paint by numbers job. But there’s one number that interests me in particular. A recent post by Bruce Daisley caught my eye. He has been looking at some recent research by Leesman showing that the top priority for people is for their workplace to provide a place where they can…
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Organisational Surface Area
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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…
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Creating place-based regenerative explorations
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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…
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Cognitive Debt
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“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 Newsletter 247 The idea of Cognitive Debt seems to have struck a chord with folk, in a good way (thank you Neil, Andrew and others who’ve…
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Kaleidoscopes – Mechanisms for Meaningful Meetings
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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…
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Design Innovation: Venture Creation
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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…
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The Malkovich Principle
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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…
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Reflections on Innovation & Future Thinking
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Toban Shadlyn and John V Willshire Introduction We are approaching the tenth anniversary year of the Innovation and Future Thinking course at IED Barcelona. In the summer of 2024, it will run from Monday 9th July for two weeks. Usually, around this time, we write an explanation of what the theme will be for the…
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Mystery Thumbs and Feature Debt
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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 here. Was it a Zoom thing? Or an Opal Camera thing? Whenever it happened, I’d spend five minutes poking at various bits of software trying to work…
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How to play Mundane Superhero
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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 came up with maybe ten years ago. But it turns out I’ve never written it…
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Taking Care of Water: IEDIFT 2023
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📢 Calling all futurists, changemakers, change-seekers, innovators 📢 . Come spend two weeks this summer at IED in Barcelona attending the Innovation and Future Thinking course. We will be bringing together a group of inspirational local and international lecturers, immersing ourselves in the local and regional context through a series of site visits, and applying…