DeepSeek: A textbook case of Christensen’s disruptive innovation
On the 10th of January 2025, a hedge fund released an artificial intelligence (AI) app into the wild. By the 27th, the world responded to DeepSeek, as the AI is known, by crashing the value of AI related stocks, creating losses totaling more than a trillion dollars. Its very existence in the market has called […]
Democratizing diagnostics by design
I began developing my approach for diagnostic study of unstructured problem spaces in complex adaptive human systems in earnest more than a decade ago. The roots of my interest in this work, however, go back more than 35 years to my final year of engineering back in Bangalore (Bengaluru). It strikes me, on reflection, […]
Multidimensional Climate Justice Must Recognize ALL Types of Knowledge Holders
What is interesting in this diagram from Kivimaa et al. (2021:7) from the Finnish Climate Change panel, is the missing component of Indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge from the sphere of Recognition Justice. Why it is interesting is because the authors cite Tribaldos & Kortetmäki (2022) among their references for the concept of justice, who […]
Paradigm change or changing paradigms?
There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense […]
Knowledge production as a process
The sense of knowing that some idea is just around the corner, waiting to be born, but still gestating inarticulately. I will dance today with other’s words and put them together in different ways, as I play around with the inchoate. May the 5th 2023 Has the idea been born? Yes. Do I know yet […]
Why I call these Gramscian times
The real sign that this wasn’t just any old “polycrisis” but a transformational inflection point in the “humanity” maturity curve was the recent news that investments in solar power are now more than that made in fossil fuels. This is a tipping point, hard to see in the midst of so much turbulence. The […]
Design Leadership in Turbulent Times: Apple’s failure of vision
It has been more than 15 years since I last dived into the topic of Apple and its design strategy or lack thereof on this blog. There were brief mentions in 2011 – when Steve Jobs announced his retirement, and then again in 2015 when the global smartphone industry transformed itself as a function of […]
Pondering the standpoint of a third culture kid (TCK) exploring plural knowledge systems
“[We] reflected on what it meant to be Brown academics (Curtis-Boles et al., 2012; Muhs et al. 2012) while personally navigating multiple cultural and work boundaries as transnational women (Joseph 2014).” (Lahiri-Roy, Belford, & Sum, 2021) Looking for a standpoint from which to respectfully approach different knowledge systems, particularly local, traditional, and Indigenous ones, led […]
Day 2, Exploratory Discovery and Sensemaking in rural Ostrobothnia, Finland #taiketukee
For design before design, I prefer immersion in the field location and alternating thinking and writing with observations and interviews in order to tightly frame the problem space and the social design challenge. My RQ is whether the application of the guiding first principles of the Scandinavian tradition of participatory design research (also known as […]
Reflecting on Béné’s review of important concepts for local food systems resilience in context of systemic shocks
Béné’s (May, 2020) review last year of the most important concepts for thinking about resilience of local food systems, in context of the pandemic and other shocks provides frameworks for situating empirical data on the resilience strategies employed by informal economic actors in the last mile of Nairobi’s urban food system specializing in fresh produce […]
