The story is a “mockumentary” done in the style of a radio documentary you might hear as a 30-minute special on NPR. While parts were definitely funny, it didn’t seem to be presented as a slapstick humorous production (a la Chris Guest’s movies).

Instead, this was speculative fiction reported on in a very serious manner, peppered with the sound collages you come to expect from well-engineered radio stories. This particular story was about childcare in the near future. Robots watch kids (cheaper than university-educated babysitters), children have implants that provide biodata like “I’m hungry,” and society faces all sorts of questions about class differences, feminism, and the ever-present abundance of overbearing parents.

In fact, this was truly science fiction in 2002, as technology presented in the show was not widely available. Disturbingly (?), in 2008, just about every innovation mentioned in the program has been demonstrated by governments, universities, companies, or even the diy-garage inventor. It’s easy to see that given a little more tinkering time, everything in the piece could arrive in the next few years.

That got me thinking about what it means to be plunging the fringes as an amateur futurist. I have friends who are educated and trained futurists (Garry, for example). They have a toolbox of systems analysis that can find patterns in our world that would indicate trends in the observable future (i.e. they think 10-20 years ahead and not 1000 years. “In our lifetime”). When Garry talks about energy, I trust him because he spends his days researching and prospecting the domain while applying his pattern-matching experience.

This activity happens all the time in thinktanks. They get paid to speculate and present the future so organizations can create strategies that might improve their success (whatever that might mean)

However, I also like the idea of domain experts (ex. architects, fashion designers, software engineers) involving themselves in near future speculation by creating representative artifacts of the future.

I’m interested in what the amateur futurist, who is not necessarily involved in thinking about trends directly, would create given an appropriate creative prompt. For example, industrial design firms often go through this exercise (“What does the vacuum cleaner look like in 2020″). Their designs might not actually function, but they will build representative mockups and create websites and commercials as if they really did exist.

Nikhil Mitter describes speculative design as

an emerging practice based research methodology that promotes designed objects as tools for critical reflection.

He goes on to say of “research objects” (i.e. the artifacts of exploration)

A presentation of form as research has the advantage of implementing all the resources afforded to material objects such as imagery, sound, tactility, presence, feedback, interaction, duration, and behavior.

I believe that this begins to approach the notion of directed tinkering as an enabler of critical thinking. You are not just hacking to hack, but you are hacking to understand a problem.

At the same time, I think most shadetree-engineers who are playing around with microcontrollers and robots would probably not think about their work this way (frankly, they wouldn’t use the word “work” to describe their benchtop experiments).

I wonder: is it possible or worthwhile to set up channels for problem solving in the form of creative prompts for hackers?

What you are seeing on my blog today is a temporary placeholder until I can officially “relaunch.”

I’ve recently moved to the East Coast (Somerville, MA) and have been doing some Big Thinking about where I’m going with my work, life, etc. Part of this is a renewed emphasis on ego-building online. It’s easier now than ever, and I’m really exhausted by seeing uninteresting people have all the fun.

However, as an antidote to my bad habits of taking on too many low-value projects and passive aggressively making the last 20% of ongoing projects drag on and on, I have been trying to implement Cal Newport’s idea of a completion-centric productivity. In a nutshell:

• Make a list of the areas of your life (ex. Professional, Relationships, Physical)
• Under each category, brainstorm on all the projects you have going on for that “sphere” of your existence.
• Identify the top 1 or 2 in each category that, if you finished them w/in 2 weeks, would make the most positive impact (however you’d like to measure that). Break down large projects into mini-projects that will take around 2 weeks to finish. I aimed for 8 or so projects.
• Create a worksheet listing of these projects. (Excel worked well for this) Next to each project, identify a completion criteria. This is a narrative that describes what your world will look like when that project is finished and out of your hair forever. (hint: write this in the past test. ex: “I submitted the article proposal to the editor.”)
• Print this out and carry it with you everywhere. This is your script for the next 2 weeks. You have to adopt a mentality that no matter what happens, you will make as much forward progress towards completion on these projects as you can every single day. At the end of 2 weeks, you should have completed every single project on that list.
• If other project ideas come up (and they will tempt you over and over), you need to put them in a holding bin. Nothing new can come on your list. If you are in the thick of it and don’t have your act together, trust me, new stuff can wait a couple weeks. Just write it on the back of your worksheet.
• Here is the key that make it work for me: I only work on one project at a time in 4 hour chunks. I also have been blocking in “me time” for things like sleep, hanging out w/ the SO, and exercise (a la The Now Habit)/ All of these are scheduled into iCal and are treated with the seriousness of meetings and appointments.

For me, this means I’ve been pulling late nighters to just get festering projects off my plate so.

It also means “Relaunch the blog” is a project that’s currently sitting in the holding bin until 8/17. So you should see a relaunch w/in 2 weeks after that (i.e. around the end of the month).

I am staring at my holding bin (and backlog of other projects) and see lots of extremely valuable, lucrative, exciting, and downright fun ideas. It is so tempting to drop the current list and just start working on those.

But that kind of action got me into lots of trouble before Hence, rigor.

FINALLY.

… and somehow, this is very unsatisfying.

Time to reiterate.

So. I went to SxSW-Interactive 2006 and got a little inspired.
Watch this space for iterationone

• Live – Observe – Collect – share
• Wonder – Question – Hypothesis – share
• Tinker – Explore – Research – Play – Prototype – Test – share
• Build – Answer – Proposition – Understanding – share
• Iterate – share

I honestly have simply not had the manhours available to focus on getting it back up.

With SxSW looming, I figured it was time to up its priority.

It should be good to go by then. Even if it means switching servers and doing crazy redirects.

I was stunned and secretly giddy to see all those hybrid commercials during the Super Bowl.

I’m getting around 42 miles per gallon in the city. Not shabby. Not earth-saving, either.

The only true hybrid: (Gas + Electric) + V(Leg Power) where V is the earth saving multiplier.

mmm-hmmmm

Here is an indyjunior map of my travels past and future for 2006. This will be an ever-evolving map.

http://www.davidnunez.com/locate (note: links to page containing flash file) Link is broken.

What would a travel log look like as a Drupal module? Could GoogleMaps mash in somehow?

In order to think through these changes, I’ve been looking at a lot of other peoples’ websites for inspiration. It is a fine line between “inspired by” and “stolen from,” but there is a lot of really good stuff out there.

• Live = observe = collect facts = actively experience = holistic
• Wonder = ask = probe = question = hypothesize
• Tinker = Learn = Research = Play = Prototype = draft = sketch = read = web surf = notetake = test
• Build = version = stopping point = iteration = results = graphs = report = deliverable = portfolio piece = value-add = evidence = truths = product = “.” = wrap-up = summary = reusable = result

To be considered prolific, you must iterate through many of these steps with lots of different projects, but normally the scorekeepers will notice those items you actually evolve into the build stage.

It is our moral and cognitive responsibility to share our progress throughout these steps as our ideas only have life in the real world, outside of our heads.

It is VERY difficult to move from wonder to tinker and even more difficult to move from tinker to build. We are reluctant to share anything that is not built. The most prolific and successful creatives know how to rapidly push through ideas into the build stage and know how to effectively share their progress while highlighting and marketing the built projects.

This means we must give each stage its proper respect, but must prod ourselves towards building as quickly as possible.

and of course:

We=I=you

Information overload makes me more than a little anxious. I find it amusing and also sad that a search for “information overload” on google yields over 11.2 million results.

The problem is that there is so much good stuff out there but no really useful tools to help sift through this meme avalanche. How does one sift out information from noise, and more importantly, how does one turn that information into usable knowledge?

After all, I don’t really care about reading 10,000 blogs, but I sure would like to pull out some useful tidbits that will improve my life at the moment I need them.

(Fair disclosure: I’m doing some consulting work for Pluck, the company behind the social bookmarking site, http://www.shadows.com and the publishers of the Pluck RSS reader. A relevant competitor is the Yahoo company, http://del.icio.us).

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One useful tool that has been all the rage among the hipsters is tagging (tagging has been around FOREVER, but reached a tipping point in the last couple years when services like flickr.com showed their usefulness).

Tagging lets you associate words (i.e. “tags”) with nuggets of information. If I am reading a website about moleskine artwork, I might decide that the site should be “tagged” with keywords like “moleskine”, “art”, “journal” etc.

Services like shadows.com allow you to add these tags to your bookmark collection. So later, when I want to do research on notetaking, I might do a search among my bookmarks for those items tagged with “journal” as a keyword.

My search would result in all those bookmarks tagged with “journal” including my moleskine art site.

In a way, you can think about tagging as putting your information (in this case, bookmarks) into file folders with arbitrary names. The difference is that you may assign that same information to lots of different folders.

This works well because you can now put your information into multiple categories very quickly. You can also run statistics over your tags to determine things like “what are my greatest interests (i.e. what are the tags with the most associated items)” and “what tags are closely associated with each other?”

The flaw is this system relies on human categorization of information. This is a manual process that is potentially time consuming: find, read, tag, find, read, tag, ad naseum. Computer artificial intelligence is not nearly close enough to being able to automatically tag information reliably.

Now there are companies, like Pluck, that have developed solutions for helping spread this work out among communities. They expose your collection of tags to everyone else. So when I do my search for “moleskine” not only do my bookmarks show up, but optionally, I can also see the bookmarks everyone else tagged with “moleskine.”

These are great steps. They help humanize the web, but have also turned us into a society of robot librarians.

So the important question is, “to what end?” I don’t think there has been a lot of detailed work in synthesizing this information so that it is usable knowledge.

In a typical web surfing session, I will use my rss reader to find interesting websites mentioned in articles on peoples’ blogs. Often, if this site is interesting, I’ll tag it through shadows.com with some keywords and then move on. Because there are so many more sites to explore, I don’t spend a lot of time reading. It’s more like, “skim, identify enough information to generate useful tags, tag, move on.”

My assumption is that I will be able to go back and search through my collection when I need the information. The reality is that I’ve spent an hour or two with low-thinking, and ultimately, low-impact work of tagging.

This is not a valuable use of my time.

Worse, this tagging will never conclude. For all intents and purposes, as it pertains to human capacity for learning and remembering, the internet is infinite. I will never run out of links to explore. When am I “done”? Chasing links is a never ending pursuit. We are stressed by tasks that will never end.

An approach I would find interesting:

Create an organized research task-list or “call sheet” that helps focus and direct my reading and research.

First, I would keep an ongoing list of research topics. This might be a collection of tags that I would want understand better. I would schedule time to deeply explore, note-take, and think about these topics.

I would use my collection of tagged bookmarks as a starting point.

This is a potentially slow process, but would yield some deeper exploration of topics. However, the problem of an unending task remains; how will I know when I’ve learned enough about the topic? It compounds because as I continue learning, newer subtopics will reveal themselves. Futhermore, older knowledge I have obtained will distort based on my new knowledge, and might require a reexamination.

However, I believe we can develop heuristics and tools that will allow me to better prioritize what I should be reading and should be learning.

Questions I have

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