Even the ancient poems of the Kalevala emphasise the role of common sense, practical knowledge, skills and understanding, instead of metaphysics or religion. (Väisänen, 2012) There is romance in the practical wisdom of the countryside, if one listens for it inbetween the practical advice given to young men and women that comprises long stanzas in… Read More »
In 2007, I was the Closing Plenary speaker for the CHI2007 25th Anniversary conference in San Jose, CA. Today, I look back at the last 15 years of the “mobile as a post industrial platform for bottom of pyramid and emerging markets” conceptual working space, and find myself ready to move on to a new… Read More »
Constructive design research necessitates building a working prototype of the concept under evaluation. Without existing in the real world and interacting with the human socio-ecological system, we cannot figure out if our paper concepts will work as designed in the real world. Social design prototypes need a very high degree of enthusiastic cooperation from the… Read More »
“Cognitive Justice: the right of different knowledges to coexist so long as they sustain the life, livelihoods, and life chances of a people.” Shiv Visvanathan, 2021 Unpacking this theoretical statement and putting it into practice in the form of design of interactive, collaborative, and social processes that comprise various participatory methodologies in design and innovation,… Read More »
… you forget the password to your own blog’s back end. I’m here to sing my song that I had been looking for since March 2021. It has taken me 18 months longer than I ever imagined, and it is the longest year and a half I have ever spent without you. Y U NO… Read More »
Yesterday, I was deep inside Google looking for datapoints to connect that would add up to give me a sense of what was going on in these turbulent times, and I came across this insightful article on strategy. It was clear the author felt as obsolete as I did about the way strategic planning for… Read More »
Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is a lucid, well-written synopsis that rapidly introduces the reader to the legacy of the colonial and imperial narratives that destroyed Indigenous ways of living with the natural environment and the living planet, for profit, trade, and glory. I was moved last night to bookmark various passages from Ghosh’s book… Read More »
“The Bauhaus School was deliberately designed to foster innovation by crossing boundaries, including boundaries between school and work and disciplinary boundaries. The School faced ongoing criticism because its innovative approaches and activities were seen to be transgressive (Bayer et al., 1938). Yet transgressive practice disrupts established knowledge and can generate new knowledge (Haraway, 2008). Despite… Read More »
I was hired by The Second City in August 1998. The letter above was issued for a visa application to visit Canada. Has it truly been a lifetime and a century since I learnt to improvise as a professional? I can only say that I must have embedded the skills and techniques so deeply in… Read More »