I’m just back from Stroud Valley’s Woodcraft Folk annual camp. It was very hot this weekend and lots of young families with kids were there. All worked out well. One thing I do every year is make a new game to play at the afternoon community fair (the Pea Fair where the chickpea is currency). […]
Deknowledgification?
The mass job losses in academia and digital industries now remind me of the 1980’s. How well-established communities of skill and capability disappeared under something justified as economic systemic change. The loss of jobs that seemed beyond control, beyond people and beyond comprehension. The market demanded the change and so it happened. Back home I […]
Good enough, safe enough prototyping
I attended a talk on Sociocracy by Transition Town movement. Interestingly it was more from the communal deliberation and decision-making perspective rather than the structure and systems angle. One theme that came up regularly was not so much alignment as pace. The community should prototype ideas and create new spaces within the axes of “Good […]
Paying attention to community
I am planning to facilitate a few online (maybe hybrid – with in-person in Stroud, UK) happenings on community development. I’m using The Community Builder’s Journal as core text as I want to work thru the time/place/action structure in a supportive group. I am not expecting everyone to have a copy but you can buy […]
Strong? Wrong? Finding the right invitation to community
Just due to my current mix of reading community development books from different perspectives, I’m wondering about how to open up invitations to new people to join a community of change. Comparing some ABCD and Anarchist ideas about Strong and Wrong. ABCD and Strong ABCD uses focus on Strong to break the idea that communities […]
Finding the right words at the start of a project
Audio version: Finding the right words When I was doing some work for the UK’s Design Council on their Systemic Design Thinking toolkit for the Climate Crisis, I ran several workshops with differing audiences. I discovered that the language within the toolkit, which was supposed to be neutral and professional, caused issues. When I used […]
Unsee’ing and Breach’ing
Unsee’ing came up at CampDigital yesterday while taking about walking around places like an alien, perception and human-centred design. Perception seeks usability – we sense and remember what is useful to our purposes and intents. This means we unsee what is there but not useful to us. We do not perceive what is useful to […]
Playing With Attention
I have just finished Attensity. It is a book created by the American collective The Friends of Attention. I found the idea of deliberately making Attention Sanctuaries interesting. More particularly, the advice to work explicitly and deliberately with people to agree what they are. A new zine I often make zines for projects and workshops. […]
The subtleties of being human
The rush to AI is built on top of an idea that digitalisation and data can replicate and comprehend being human. The big datasets and models now coming with personalities and fluent conversations. Yet this smooth completeness is superficial. It ignores the subtleties that actually make up human experiences. Embodiment matters There are two ways […]
Losing Human Being with AI
Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language talks about how, over time, humans streamline their languages. Words are blurred and shortened. Grammar compacts and lose rules. Humans want to communicate but they also want to do it more efficiently and more lazily. This linguistic ‘degradation’ has led to centuries of complaints about the failure of […]