I am just back from Leeds. I was there for a 2 day Storytelling Lab for organisations working with refugees. It was very good and the power of people who had been thru deep horrors was extraordinary. However, this post is not about that. It’s about some of the things I saw and some ideas […]

I’m doing some volunteer work on a local climate crisis project. The project wants to build a Lifehouse. A place where people can come together and share resources during climate collapse-related loss of civic society and services. What we talked about this week was Impact Mapping. How to start a project and try and understand […]

Just looking for synonyms for Resilience for a community project. Resilience as a lost word The word Resilience has been lost to the corporate training idea of providing skills to individuals to cope with the problems they encounter. This is a terrible meaning. Resilience should be more about systemic and organisational change to eliminate those […]

Rather than avoiding the people pressing copies of The Light onto Saturday shoppers in Stroud, I decided to go up and take one. The Light is a conspiracy theory newspaper which is known to be funded by right wingers. It’s in the same cognitive twist zone as yoga/natural food fanatics who became right wingers during […]

I noticed a design conference had an open call for talks this week and this is what I wrote as an application. Let’s Get Serious For the last decade, ideas of play and gamification have been prevalent in the design of services and workshops. That playfulness and fun were the methods of engaging and enabling […]

Building a new country based on data After WW2, as the country rebuilt itself from war damage and built the new social security and health systems promised to citizens, the British civil servants did something that seems odd. They decided to replicate databases rather than built a single centralised database. Thus there was a database […]

This is a post about a possible public event in Stroud. I was talking to Madeleine Bunting today about Civic Assemblies and community conversations. We discussed how hard this is and what barriers there are to meeting and talking about subjects of shared interest. The problems of both finding a stable foundation of reality and […]

I am going to run a few free workshops locally on memory consolidation and sharing. This is based on some 2018 work in dementia support and memorability. I have left the topic alone for a while but realised I want to do some more work on it. DIVE DIVE was a workshop methodology that came […]

Much news about UK government and #AI today. The Guardian had this summary. What this reminds me of is how 18th century governments were hypnotised by the idea of humans as machines in a mechanistic universe. The Mechanical Turk The Mechanical Turk con is well known and still relevant but what is often missed is […]

19th century had major technical and scientific advances but also a whole lot of weird BS like Spiritualism and Telepathy. In expanding a space of future possibilities with real innovation, it appears you also always create a grifting weird BS space. The magical thinking is inevitable consequence of new thinking. Metaphorical space is tricky In […]