Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. …
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. …
We live in an age where technology is developing at a rate faster than what any individual can keep up with. To survive in an age of acceleration, we need a new way of thinking about technology. *** …
“Each of us human beings, for example, is the product of an enormously long sequence of accidents, any of which could have turned out differently.” — Murray Gell-Mann *** What parts of …
“Biological thinking and physics thinking are distinct, and often complementary, approaches to the world, and ones that are appropriate for different kinds of systems.” *** How should we …
The map-territory mental model is about understanding the difference between perceptions (the ‘map’) and the actual reality (the ‘territory’). It’s like having a map of a …
In Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, Mauboussin does a good job adding to the work we’ve already done on complex adaptive systems: You can think of a complex adaptive system …
This beautiful excerpt from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention beautifully illustrates why it’s so hard to pin down creativity and …
“Simple rules are shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information. The rules aren’t universal— they’re tailored to the …
Checklists establish a higher level of baseline performance. *** A useful reminder from Atul Gawande, in The Checklist Manifesto: In a complex environment, experts are up against two main …
“There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.” — Michael Friendly *** It’s tempting to consider information …
Let’s explore the concept of the Complex Adaptive Systems and see how this model might apply in various walks of life. To illustrate what a complex adaptive system is, and just as importantly, what it …
A bit of a preface to this post. Please read the definition of Antifragile first. While the article below is interesting, the reader should read with a critical mind. Complexity ‘solved’ …
While it seems more and more common these days, it’s important to determine when you’re operating in complexity. Complexity means that little things can have a big effect and big things …
John Maeda offers five design-informed approaches for learning. BASICS are the beginning. REPEAT yourself often. AVOID creating desperation. INSPIRE with examples. NEVER forget to repeat yourself. …
Science pursues answers to questions, but not always the questions that engineering must ask. The founding father of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, who aptly described the difference between science …
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.” John Maeda is a graphic designer and computer scientist. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, proposes ten laws for …