designing conversations
We live in a world that is designed for us.
Everything from our iPhones to our toothbrushes have been thoughtfully designed to fit the purposes they are designed to fit.
We like to think of design as the work of an inspired designer, acting alone. There is truth to that. Also, design is a process that evolves in the context of a larger conversation about purpose and fitness. Because good design is fit for purpose. Good design creates an elegantly effective experience that is so satisfying, we don’t even notice we are having the experience that was designed for us.
This makes design a fundamentally co-creative and collaborative process. A conversation within the population about the purposes the design is designed to fit.
Evergreen is good design. It evolved out of a conversation about the purpose of pensions that expanded into a conversation about the nature of prosperity that evolved into a conversation about the purpose of finance and the nature of capitalism, enterprise, technology and the purposes of the university and philanthropy.
This is a conversation that is itself evergreen, open-ended and endlessly ongoing. Because good design is provisional, suited to the purposes for which it was designed, but subject to change when purpose changes.
And purposes are more or less constantly changing.
Please join us in this evolving conversation about creating the future the world needs now, by design.
Adaptively Evolving New Theories of Change
In her article, recently published on evonomics.com, What Is Radical Economics? (Hint: It’s Not Neoliberal or Marxist) Julie Nelson, professor of economics and department chair at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a senior research fellow
Writing New Narratives for the 21st Century
In a recent article published in the on-line journal Evonomics, Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, writes in a post he titles, It’s
Impact Investing for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Impact Investing for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness Last Friday I attended the 2017 Kick-Off Event for the New England Impact Investing Initiative. This is a new meet-up being organized for the purpose
Rethinking or Adaptively Evolving?
This morning's mail included a flyer from our local newspaper, The Providence Journal, advertising a One Day University event on Rethinking America. In these first few days of Donald Trump's America, and the
Elon Musk, Tesla Tiles and the Energy Future the World Needs Now
Elon Musk held a press event to introduce his Tesla tiles for his new solar roof. The event invites some imagineering of our own, about the energy future that the world needs now, and the all-important
Imagine that we actually build it
This week, Rethinking Ecomomics, a group of dissident students dissatisfied with conventional orthodoxy in teaching on the economy, announced the publication of a new book, The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts
projects and publications
In Tim MacDonald’s Talk at TEDx New Bedford last November, he used a quote by Walt Disney to set the point of departure for an exploration into evergreen superfiduciaries.
The Walt Disney quote is this:
“The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.”
Tim’s point is this. Before we can quit talking in order to start doing, we first have to START TALKING!