A provocative interview. I've added a few key excerpts from the interview. It does suggest that we're going to need a new category of designer and architect in the business environment. The discussions around business models of recent years are a kind of first order example of this. What was missing and will be needed are designers with a sensitivity to the complexities of economic and information systems.

Speaking of Gain 2.0. Don't miss this interview with Michael Benedikt on his Towards a General Theory of Value. Academic, conceptual, intellectual and very, very smart. Worth wading through if you're interested in creating value through design. [ia/ - news for information architects]

...if we didn't have a theory of value—and in particular, a good theory of economic value—then we couldn't decrease our failure rate, we couldn't steer our efforts, and we wouldn't have the ideas we needed to come up with new enterprises and solutions. Trial and error would remain the only method, with "guns or butter" utilitarianism our only economic doctrine.

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What new areas of production, employment, and enjoyment are going to carry the economy into the future? I offer: design and architecture.

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At the most global level, design is speeded-up evolution, courtesy of our excess of gray matter.

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First, if understood, my theory will put pay to business's predilection for reductive simplicity in design, which yields only temporary and local economic advantage. The thrust of life's evolution is towards greater degrees of complexity and, at the same time, towards greater degrees of organization, the two together, in balance, at many scales.

10:21:05 PM •  • comment  

Helpful advice on generating case studies. Always a useful tool to make the abstractions more accesible

A marketing look at case studies. Debbie Weil has written a brief article on top tips to write a pursuasive case study. While this looks at... [Column Two]

3:25:32 PM •  • comment  

I've been eagerly awaiting the release of liveTopics so it's only fitting that I blog this as my first entry using it. The timing is apt as I'm beginning to review what's been working and what needs improving in this effort to use weblog as backup brain. For my purposes, Radio's category feature is not dynamic or fine-grained enough for my fluid (some would say dilletantish) interests. I now think of Radio's categories as distribution channels that should reflect variations in the target audience more than variations in the channel's content.

The curse of better knowledge tools is balancing past efforts against future gains. A tolerable process when new tools appear rarely. A central challenge for knowledge work in these times of rapid change.

liveTopics finally released.

Kind of a double celebration:

• Today, and with great relief, I formally announce the release of liveTopics (v1.0.3) which is now available for download.
• You can read more about it at my company's website which I am also launching today.

It's been hard work putting together even the little currently on the website, but I hope to improve it significantly in the days and weeks ahead.  Any feedback would be very welcome.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

9:59:59 AM •  • comment