You understand the instructions only after you've assembled the red wagon. MG Taylor Axiom, 1983

Matt and I had a lot of fun developing our axioms.  We lived in Nederland, above Boulder, CO and we were teaching workshops on life planning.   Our participants were smart, into alternative life styles and from all economic sectors. They were teachers, entrepreneurs, government leaders, inventors, scientists and artists.  Ages ranged from 15 to 70. Yet, with each there were so many unquestioned assumptions about how life was meant to be.   As we rode to and from our four-day workshop ... back and forth from Nederland to Boulder... we drove through a number of ecosystems, up and down through winding hills and valleys. We would muse on our work and how the participants were so intrigued with our way of teaching. We came to realize:  1) how hungry people were for rich alternatives and new ways of thinking and doing; and 2) how foreign our way of thinking was to most of the participants.  Many of our ideas had not been explored before.  Thus, we decided that the best way to present our ideas was through a set of design axioms.  As we drove, the axioms began to spill forth, prompted I think, by what was occurring in our workshops ...

One of my favorite is "You understand the instructions only after you've assembled the red wagon."  Experts are taught to know the answer up front so this axiom was clearly out of scope for them. 

Today I listened to an interview with Miranda July about her book of short stories, No one belongs here more than you.  I was spell bound by her philosophy and her writing. Her website is titled: Obviously, you know what I am talking about.  Originally, the title gave her confidence and made her feel comfortable with her ideas. Then, she noted, as she performed or spoke to audiences that hundreds of heads were nodding in agreement with her stories.  Her words were indeed, obvious... familiar and captivating.

4 qualities to imbue in your next collaborative, participatory or collective design process:

Recursion
Iteration
Simultaneousness
Knodality

Following up on a previous post, further evidence of the cultural shift within the World Economic Forum:

• I see that they have selected "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" for the theme of their 08 Annual Meeting in Davos - a theme well outside the imagination - collaborative, collective, or otherwise - of the Forum only a couple of years ago.
• The WorkSpace has continued to get prominent placement and widespread engagement this year, with return deployments to the Middle East and Africa, as well as inaugural trips to China (including sessions entirely in Mandarin) and India (coming in December).

The sign of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two or more opposing ideas at one time and still function. Author unknown

Last evening Matt and I enjoyed a glass of wine at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco. We watched the sun set over the Golden Gate bridge.  I loved sitting tall and able to look over the city. I enjoyed the energy of others we were sharing the space with.  Bar hoppers, after work parties, singles looking for friendship, other couples, even two young babies.  Smiles were freely given, life was good.  Indeed.  

My last Journal entry, The World Without Us, was a lamentation about all the things we humans have built while unaware of the consequences of our efforts. Cities are built and created with untold amounts of unsustainable materials... some that will last centuries into the future, continuing to transform and morph our environment into something unknown...alien to plants, animals, and humans alike.   And yet, cities are wonderful and life giving! Mankind has known this for thousands of years; always people have gathered to form community and market places. There is something utterly contagious about cities for all of their wonder and corruption.  Could they just be good without being bad? Probably not. The diversity and magic of cities is created by the inclusion of all perspectives ... prospect and refuge.

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...

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...

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.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Yesterday I heard a podcast about  blind teenagers becoming photographers.  Tony Deifell, a teacher and photographer, has created a new book called Seeing Beyond Sight.  He  tells this story: After the photographs have been developed, we, as a class, talk about each one. I remark about what I see and the student acknowledges whether this was her intent.  Sometimes, Tony, assumes that the photographer missed the image she was trying to get.  In one such case where there was  a photograph of a sidewalk with a crack, he assumed that the creator had missed. But, the young photographer said, "No, this is what I wanted.  My cane gets caught in the crack and I trip. I want to send this picture to the city department so they can fix the crack." Tony went on to talk about the letter she wrote to the city acknowledging how they must have no idea how such a thing could be bothersome. In fact, she went on, it is only because I am blind that I notice it.  (The crack got fixed!)