👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🏴☠️ When to Design for Emergence:
Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs [..] In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.
11-minute read by Kasey Klimes in rhizome r&d
🧱 Make Megaprojects More Modular:
To entrepreneurs in the tech industry, much of this will sound familiar and logical. But large corporations and governments have yet to internalize these lessons for big-ticket projects [..] but there is still plenty of scope for choosing technologies that enable rapid scaling and introducing modularity by applying tried-and-true technologies in innovative ways.
12-minute read by Bent Flyvbjerg in Harvard Business Review
👩🎨 The Power of Product Thinking:
[P]roduct thinking is more holistic and intuitive about the relationship between people and products [..] you rely on your instincts for what you believe will work the best for your audience. A product vision describes an idealized end state for how a product will create value in the world, but it doesn’t necessarily describe why or how. It might be a story to latch onto, or a vivid image of a possible future that paints what success looks like…
10-minute read by Julie Zhuo in Future
🎧 Listening
👩🎨 Make Things, and Be Playful:
My daughter's excited about [Tesla]. I remember I was supposed to talk to him and she said to me: "I want you to tell him that he should make a clear Tesla." The mere fact that this six year old knows what it is and then has product design suggestions is pretty great. And I think that's pretty great, because you know who we aren't saying that about? The CEO of GM [..] It is a net positive for the world that more kids are excited about engineering and entrepreneurship because of him.
79 minutes with Jimmy Soni on Infinite Loops
🤖 Wait, The Robots Didn't Take Our Jobs?
Technology can be used to imitate and replicate and automate what humans are doing. It can also be used to complement and extend or augment what humans are doing. Both of those can be very profitable; both of those are successful strategies, and there are definitely some things we would love to automate away [..] But most human progress has actually not come from that kind of automation of replacing what we're doing [..] It's come from using technology to allow us to do new things.
34 minutes with Erik Brynjolfsson on Big Technology Podcast
Inside Davos + Understanding the Geopolitical Recession:
Everywhere you look, we're finding different governments that see advantages to in-sourcing, friend-sourcing, and being generally anti-globalization. And those are all messages that just rub the Davos crowd the wrong way. That fundamental tension of where it goes was core to every kind of conversation we were having. Maybe not the crypto bros there, that just think that governments go away and they are just going to be dominant.
57 minutes with Ian Bremmer on The Prof G Pod
🎁 One More Thing
Fitting with this week’s theme, we published a presentation on The Nature of Digital Transformation. Which turns out to be emergent, after all… 🤓
📬 Suggestions?
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