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.
A Strange New Beauty
Today, as I was leaving the Providence Athenaeum on a morning walk with Paco, our pug, this book about Degas caught my attention. The title, set against a monotype print of industrial age factory smokestacks,
Real Assets. Real Enterprises.
Insurance & Pensions Europe (IPE) is a publication that reports on the investment activities of insurance companies and pension funds, in Europe. In a recent report, they focused on the increasing popularity of investing in
Speaking Power to Truth
Many social change advocates do good by speaking Truth to Power. We are doing good by speaking Power to Truth. Our primary audience are those stewards of perpetual capital to whom we all, as a society, have entrusted
Climate Leadership from Rhode Island
How do we balance reliability, affordability and sustainability? At Friday's 7th Annual Rhode Island Energy and Environmental Leadership conference organized by our United States Senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, that was how the question of
Imaging Evergreen
At evergreencore.org we are intensely engaged in the work of showing the world the power and the possibilities for superfiduciary self- and other-discovery and a movement of superfiduciaries towards evergreen. The challenge is multi-dimensional, because the
Growing a New Vocabulary
Growing a New Vocabulary Words are the building blocks of language, and language is the DNA of shared meaning and shared understanding that binds people together through technology, society, enterprise, authority, authenticity, integrity and morality. Finance is part
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!
