fctry ^ 2

Between 2014 and 2018 there was a rush of books and articles about "trust", some of it prompted by the creeping invasiveness of consumer surveillance, some by social media, some by the surprising results of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US elect…

This weekend I had the pleasure of reading Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described how science is more than experiments and the natural laws derived from them, it is also a community, a culture of language and practices that build knowledge and understanding.

Alberto Romero wrote a wonderful post about what it feels like to be a support of the AI industry (whatever that might mean) today: I want to express my frustrations with the industry as someone who would love to see it doing well.

What thinking about economics does for designers Designers and product people don’t think about economics all that often.

Do you like predicting the future?

A few months back I gave a talk to a group at Rosenfeld Media called the Quant-Qual Bridge who looks at ways of bridging quantitative and qualitative thinking in design research and broader design practice.

A lot of people are quite excited about the Humane AI Pin, some are not, quite a few more didn’t hear about it at all.

Why should we care about making communality possible?

A little while back I posted a little challenge on LinkedIn: Tell me about an individual, discrete, and actionable policy that would prevent harms by an AI.

Matching for Causes without Experiments Sometimes we have an experiment that we can run to figure out if something is working: give one person a pill and give another a placebo, one person gets a blue button and another gets a green one, one town gets a n…

I wrote a few articles last year that explored how we could look at how measuring what a redesign of a service caused.

In Bill Arnings brilliantly titled essay “Sure, everyone might be an artist…but only one artist gets to be the guy who says that everyone else is an artist” Arning writes about a bake sale that artist Elaine Tin Nyo held at the New York City gallery Deitch

In the last article that I posted here I dug into what an experimental design to test the ease of use of a service design might look like.

What does your design cause which is undesirable or unintended or at odds with the design intent?

I am oh so very close to the finish line of the Masters of Information in Data Science at UC Berkeley and in between battling CUDA ‘Out Of Memory’ errors and underperforming neural networks, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what brought me to this po…

Before a work trip I was instructed to take an anti-malarial drug.

This little essay is, like so many of the things that I post on Medium, a wooly ramble that doesn’t end with a pat conclusion.

A few days ago I (jokingly) said in a conversation: “Instagram was discovered in 2010” And when I thought about it for a moment I realized it actually didn’t sound as wrong as I meant it to.

I’ve been trying to understand the difference between art and design for years now.

My friend John Wieja passed away December 25, 2017 in Zhuhai China, a few weeks before he would have turned 42 years old.

Video These boards are for a workshop I ran at Resonate 2016 called “Volt, Amp, Synth & Sound” I really wanted to make a simple workshop about electronics that all beginners could understand.

Yesterday I was driving up I5 here and as I started to go from I5 Northbound to the Madison exits I saw a guy very nonchalantly pushing a shopping cart along the side of the off-ramp against traffic.

People sometimes ask what I think about when I run for hours on end.

I have read Ian Bogost and I’ve begun reading Graham Harman, and it’s becoming entirely clear to me why new media artists are so enamored with their ideas.

Here is an image taken without the subjects explicit permission in public: Here is another: Here is a third: What is the difference between these images?