The World Without Us

/

It is very easy to get a stable system, but very difficult to get the one you want." Kevin Kelley, Out of Control, 1993

I am reading The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. Weisman does a brilliant job of de-constructing Planet Earth given the proposition that humans somehow vanished from her.  His research took him throughout the world asking questions of engineers and scientists about how long our built world would last without our care-taking.  The book is mind-blowing! Whether cities, farms, forests, oceans, or desert, man has tinkered enough for his own purposes to totally distort Earth's ecosystems.  Unintended consequences are just beginning to surface, many of them long known to those who created products and services for the benefit of mankind...

Read More

Facebook

/

I've recently joined the Facebook community. Many of my design colleagues in The Value Web have been using it for a while. After receiving several invitations, I figured it was was time to check it out. Though I don't yet know what to 'do with it' exactly, I'm finding it fun, engaging, and sticky - just what you'd want out of a social networking utility, and just what is missing from my experience of networking sites such as LinkedIn. Reportedly now signing up around 150,000 new users a day, Facebook has struck a nice balance between professional/business and personal/play...

Read More

Resurfacing

/

It has been almost seven months since my last published journal. Five months and a few days ago my son, Owen, was born.  I have spent the better part of this time wondrously immersed in this new-to-me world of parenthood, in which "nothing is different but everything's changed," to use a lyric of Paul Simon's. Over this time, I've stepped back but stayed in touch with Tomorrow Makers projects and been actively engaged in many conversations of possibility.

After beginning several journal articles that have yet to find a finish, I'm taking a new tact. In the past, I've taken an essayist approach to these blogs. My intent going forward will simply be to share thoughts, ideas, connections in a  more-or-less real-time manner. Sometimes spontaneous, often without conclusion or artistic refinement, I hope to use this forum to express the flows of people, places, ideas and information as our paths cross.

Read More