Monthly Archives: April 2010

“Assumption 1. Participatory activity is like all art: it is presentational. It is not. There is no product put out into the world, like a play, video tape, piece of music, etc. Assumption 2. Participatory activity has an audience to … Continue reading →

“Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It’s about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.”

– Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction Continue reading →

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Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

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– The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky Continue reading →

“It was really important that we used the reality of the building and its people in the story of the adventure, wrote the least possible fiction, because that meant that people wouldn’t know what was real and what was Rabbit. Because the authorship is obscured, it means that everything could be part of it, and perceptions of your place are heightened and transformed.”

– All Play: Playing in a city Continue reading →

“The evolutionary environment for technology is messy, driven by failure. It is an environment in which needs and economics run amok, killing great ideas in the wrong habitat, preserving oddities in niches, It’s an enviroment which may yet change beyond recognition as the world changes. But I’m peculiarly reassured by how often our ingenuity can bridge the failure gap, how failure reveals the human.”

– All Play: Pecha Kucha Fail Continue reading →