Learning to think about the process instead of the outcome
As a practitioner of long standing, I have been accustomed to emphasizing the focus of my analysis and synthesis on the content generated by my application of the design methods and process rather than on the process and tools themselves beyond the adaptation to better fit for purpose in relatively more complex and challenging contexts […]
“The craftsman not only owns the creation but owns the entire process”
The title is a mild adaptation from Samim’s blogpost. Which, in turn, is a snippet taken from a tweet. We pass our words around the world when they capture our imagination. This is the beauty of the interwebz we mustn’t forget whilst navigating the messes made in recent years through the proliferation of profit seeking […]
Preparing the ground for the next steps
I’ve been working on a paper, as I’m sure any regular readers still left after all my literature reviews, would have noted. And the meat of it is written out, it will just require more writing and rewriting to get it into shape. For the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve found myself slipping […]
Resilience of informal urban food systems: Does a systems thinking approach make a difference?
Sterk, van de Leemput, and Peeters (2017) help me start off this sensemaking exercise by clearly distinguishing the difference between engineering resilience and ecological resilience with respect to a system. This was useful to establish the direction of exploration for informal urban food systems. Specifically, Sterk et al (2017) state that ‘engineering’ resilience focuses on […]
On the other hand
Enough time has passed that I must remind myself not to forget to continue my search for magic in the rhythm of my word craft, nor the music of the keyboard. On one hand, I cannot deny that writing and thinking deeply and analytically have begun to flow easily in a manner that I have […]
Contextualizing design of remote interventions for local food systems resilience strategies in literature
I began my academic explorations on this blog a couple of months ago with a post on the power of sensemaking to transform the context and frame of reference, and thus provide a means for empowering one to make decisions for a decidedly unknown near future, where increased uncertainty and volatility have become the norm. […]
Situating sensemaking in the process of innovation
“the bottom-line goal of Sense-Making from its inception has been to find out what users – audiences, customers, patrons, employees – ‘really’ think, feel, want, dream” (Dervin, 1998) Morente & Ferràs (2018) paper, based on the practical and theoretical contributions of Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Theory (2015), provided me with this quoted reference that set me […]
Exploratory User Research to Inform and Inspire Innovation Frontiers: Nokia’s legacy
Swedberg (2020) offers a glimpse of the legacy of an exploratory approach to research. The reasons for using such an approach, based on his analysis, are: The empirical situation makes it necessary to use an exploratory approach. Swedberg (2020) gives the example of a study conducted in 1937 by Lazarsfeld & Stouffer on the effects […]
A change of pace to break up a pattern
In the midst of data analysis and writing up results focused on one of the key insights emerging from the masses of information hidden within the remote resilience project’s datasets means making a change of pace from the rather frantic reading and writing I’d been lately doing. I’ve discovered, via experimentation, that the two are […]
Will Africans lead innovation in resilience tech for sustainable lifestyles on a shoestring?
A Tanzanian startup offering a smart hydroponics kit for urban farming in limited spaces that costs around $500. Reading about the system yesterday – invented by founders Praygod Japhet and Dickson Mallya – I was moved to create a hashtag #resiliencetech on Twitter. Something about the topic made me feel that I should be keeping […]
