by JCM | 22 Aug, 2020 | Structures & Models
I’ve been getting increasingly sucked into the systems thinking wormhole in recent months, and this piece brings together a lot of the reasons why in a wonderfully readable bit of weekend lean-back longform food for thought – on the pandemic, society, science, economics, politics, and everything in between.
The concepts of information flux, robustness mechanisms, Sauron’s bias and monkey fights are definitely ones I can see myself obsessing over and trying to work into future strategy decks…
(Also, one of the co-authors of which has the truly awesome job title “Professor of Complexity”, giving me a whole new career aspiration.)
A teaser:
As the mathematician John Allen Paulos remarked about complex systems: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is. And knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.’ Instead of prioritising outcomes based on the last bad thing that happened – applying laser focus to terrorism or inequality, or putting vast resources into healthcare – we might take inspiration from complex systems in nature and design processes that foster adaptability and robustness for a range of scenarios that could come to pass.
This approach has been called emergent engineering. It’s profoundly different from traditional engineering, which is dominated by forecasting, trying to control the behaviour of a system and designing it to achieve specific outcomes. By contrast, emergent engineering embraces uncertainty as a fact of life that’s potentially constructive.
When applied to society-wide challenges, emergent engineering yields a different kind of problem-solving.
by JCM | 21 Aug, 2020 | Systems & Technology
Being a words person it’s unsurprising this piece spoke to me, as it advocates using words as an accessible tool – Google Docs – to improve creative collaboration.
Yes, at its heart, this place is basically saying that a collaborative design/multimedia/dev briefing doc is a good idea – and it’s hard to argue against that.
But it also speaks to a core challenge in the digital creative industries – especially now we’re all working from home and can no longer scribble on whiteboards and move post-it notes around on walls:
What’s the best way to collaborate when developing visual concepts? How can we lower barriers to entry for those with less confidence in their visual thinking skills? How can we encourage more diverse thinking, more originality, while still staying focused on the core objectives?
I’d be fascinated to hear your suggestions / recommendations.
by JCM | 12 Aug, 2020 | Systems & Technology
PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later
Punchy title and many good points made. But PDFs are an easy target.
It’s also ironic that in attacking PDFs as clunky, hard to read in a browser, and bad for mobile, the authors have created a 2,400-word monster without a single engaging image or design element to break up the wall of text. And they’re so keen to make their point as robustly as possible that a few too many arguments are piled on top of each other – some rather weaker than others.
The point they miss is format needs to be led by function – the medium isn’t the message, but it does shape it. For some functions, a PDF is a better option than HTML, for others a simple email may be best. Your format should depend on your objective, target audience, and what impression you want to leave them with.
Most importantly, *presentation* also needs to be shaped by format, audience, and objective. Sometimes, better a PDF where the design is fixed than responsive HTML that messes up your careful layout when your key client views it on their ancient IE6-running machine. (Bitter experience…)
If you want to persuade, your thinking and presentation always need to be good, no matter the format. Sloppy content structure, sloppy design and sloppy thinking will undermine your objectives far faster than a PDF ever will.
