I just finished setting up my first showing of the soapstone carvings I’ve been doing annually for the past six years. They’ll be at the Haworth (NJ) Library throughout September.
Here’s what I wrote about it for the show:
Continued…
Shapeshifting Soapstone at Haworth Library
Posted in Uncategorized.
User experience lessons from the classroom
For the past few months I’ve been teaching high school science in a public high school. Its providing fertile ground for experimentation with various UX approaches. So far, the lessons learned seem very applicable to communicating anything.
Attention is precious — and fragile. If you can catch it, however fleetingly, don’t waste it. Don’t overwhelm the channel and don’t get sidetracked. Stay on message and reward users each time you deliver a new piece of information. Make them feel valued and smarter each time they engage with you.
Teaching or brand-building takes thousands of interactions — any one of which can go awry and derail the process. You need to always deliver incremental value with the promise of more on the next interaction and never assume understanding or agreement without testing. And be prepared to start from scratch each day.
Simple lessons really, but hard in practice.
Posted in UX.
Positive Youth Development and the Beloved Community
What Is the Purpose of Youth Ministry?
The past decade has seen significant new developments in both church youth programming and developmental psychology as mega-churches have applied and advanced organizational development theories and developmental systems theorists have focused on the mutual interplay between individual and context. Continued…
Posted in Research.
What is emergent design?
Emergent design is evolutionary. It manifests itself in practice with constant evaluation and feedback moderating the strategic imperatives.
Emergent design holds both emergence—the bubbling up of new phenomena from the random interaction of individuals—and design—the planned progression of events towards a goal—in a dynamic embrace that maintains a higher level view of the process, and thus transcends the apparent duality by facilitating the interaction between the two approaches. It seeks to reduce the friction points that inhibit the free flow of information and to allow for experimentation towards a goal, so that product development is more like the leaves of trees reaching for the light than central planning.
Emergent design is an expression of the dynamic interactive processes of ecology on a micro, macro, and generational scale. It is also the mechanism for growth in an ecological growth economy. It contains The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Spider and the Starfish.
Posted in emergence.