Linkin’s parked.

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Scenarios and storytelling.

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Random thought about scenarios. Lots of different times, in lots of different companies; I’ve been in the situation where scenarios are being generated in break-out groups in a workshop, then brought back to the larger group for presentation and criticism.

Now – this type of work is only ever rough-scoping work, and it would be risky to base design work on it without more criticism or validation, but as it’s at the top of the funnel of product or service development often. And also more often than not – it’s done in ‘kick-off’ meets where stakeholders and project influencers who might be so heavily involved in the detailed work further along. So it can have a big influence.

Looking back, I’m wondering how much performance and storytelling influence the creation of scenarios in these situations. That is, when we brainstorm, as social animals, rather than objectively shaping scenarios for further development – how much are we looking for approval and engagement with our stories and ideas from those present?

Related: discussion about persona-driven design and the creation of personas on CHI-WEB.

P.K.D.

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Great Philip K. Dick quote found at AllAboutGeorge:

“We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups.

I ask, in my writing, What is real?

Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.

I ought to know.

I do the same thing.”

About to go and snuggle up with the lastest PKD-themed Wired.

Them++: Cybermen in the networked city

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Snapped on The Strand on Thursday for my photoblog.

Cybermen weren’t like the Daleks. Daleks were frightening, but Daleks were meglomaniacs – bent on destruction and dominion. You couldn’t reason with them, and they were totally bonkers but you had to admire their zeal and passion.

Cybermen were destructive and terrifying, but they were also technocrats. The coldness of their approach to their enemies and allies, their willingness to lose a battle if they thought it would help win the war. Their almost managerial bureaucratic approach to problems.

Yup – the Daleks and the Cybermen: the Tories and New Labour of the cosmos.

Forefathers

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Alex has written a fascinating article for Boxes&Arrows about a possible forefather of the web who predates Vannevar Bush:

“With the faceted philosophy of the UDC as backdrop, the Traité posited a universal “law of organization” declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa. “[A]ll bibliological creation,” he said, “no matter how original and how powerful, implies redistribution, combination and new amalgamations.”

While that sentiment may sound postmodernist in spirit, Otlet was no semiotician; rather, he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called “facticity”—a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet’s world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document.

Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative “trails” between documents. Distinguishing Otlet’s vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship.

Otlet’s vision suggests an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing, and endlessly re-configurable by the individual reader or writer.”

In other news from the ’eminence-grise’ desk, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are visiting London and heading for the RIBA for an event called: “Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn Meet the BBC”.

An apt venue, as all these Net-forefathers (Otlet included) look like The Architect.

» Boxes and Arrows: Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet

Place and space

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Couple of things:

I’ve started to re-read “Space is the machine” by Bill Hillier; and I’d forgotten the brilliant quote at the start by Sheep:

“…I thought that all that functional stuff had been refuted. Buildings aren’t machines.”

“You haven’t understood. The building isn’t the machine. Space is the machine.”

I’ll be back in London for the Bill Mitchell talk, so maybe see you there.