A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
I'm going to use the term 'affordance' in what follows, and I know from experience over the years that people misunderstand this term:
In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.
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Andrew Curry summarises and adds to Art Kleiner's post about things we already know are going to happen in 2030. Kleiner channels Pierre Wack's idea of the “predetermined element” using the example of the River Ganges:
…After reading this, I realised that the way I organise my life is a bit like this. Really, it's about boundary-setting with yourself and others.
Sometimes it's about taking things away and setting limits; other times it's about adding something as a different option - for example, my analogue desk gives me a different thing to do in the morning rather than immediately go on a screen.
…I'm not sure whether it's the old one gets, or just the older I personally get, but essentially nothing is urgent. As I'm fond of quoting the artist Finley Quaye as saying, "good things happen slowly, bad things happen fast."
…I've long been an advocate of 'islands of productivity'. It's a fancy way of saying that it's a good idea, for me at least, to do different kinds of things in different spaces.
So, for example, I go to coffee shops and to the library. But I also sit in what we affectionately call our 'spare lounge' (because we're not posh enough to need/want a dining room) and do things on my laptop.
…Earlier this week, I read Mike Caulfield's announcement that he's started a new film podcast with Jim Groom(!) Since then, I haven't been able to get this section of his post out of my head:
I tried to talk to a number of people I used to talk with about films, like 10 years ago, all the time. They turned out to not be able to talk about films anymore. They would get two beats into talking about the plot of a movie then veer off and start talking about how this film either shows how their political position is right, or — if it shows them to be wrong –how this is evidence of a vast Hollywood conspiracy.
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Source: Are.na
This is interesting. I experimented with bitchat when it first came out but now it looks like it's a bit more mature.
It's the kind of app we should all encourage friends and family to install, just in case. More on the Wikipedia page, including a bit of a genealogy of similar apps and how they have been used.
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