Digital Cubicles
Right now around the world people are working from home in new digital cubicles. We may not be in the office, but we are in new boxes of isolation in our homes.
It's not #digitaltransformation if you told everyone to go work from home for safety. It's not even strategy. It's a reaction. No surprise that the technology works. It's worked for years. Others already use it to do differently & different things. That's transformation
— Simon Terry (@simongterry) April 20, 2020
None of this digital transformation has anything to do with how many video images your videoconferencing platform shows on screen in meetings. What matter is how organisations and individuals work, learn and adapt. The real value is not to work on digital tools. The value creation occurs when we work, learn and adapt in new ways.
The Design Squiggle
It’s Creative Commons!
The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com
Don’t Build
Silicon Valley VCs want us to “build” right now, but build what? It’s like telling someone sitting in a field of wheat that you’re ready for your pizza. We probably don’t need more blockchains or skyscrapers. We probably do need more bike lanes and nurse practitioners. But who the hell knows?
Don’t build! Because you’ll build the same damn thing you built before. Make lists of broken things. Hospitals shouldn’t have to cut salaries in a crisis; schools shouldn’t be food banks, telemedicine shouldn’t have waiting rooms. The future is right in front of us. It’s ugly as hell, and it’s being hacked together on mobile phones. Learn new tools and think how the tools could fix the broken things.
Your privacy depends on other people
There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.
Your privacy online depends on how other people treat what they think is their information.
Weeknote CW18 (S2e2)
Questions this season are from Question Cards.
Another week in iso.
Let’s just jump right in, shall we?
Monday-Wednesday: Finished a re-do of a report for a client. I thought it was good. They thought it had too much theory and not enough practicality. Fair enough.
Company names are always made up and change week to week.
My team started a project we won last week with Icescape Industries. It’s sort of the same as a project we recently finished with Ogre Lighting but we’re working much closer to the executive at Icescape.
A bit more bizdev here and there.
Thursday: I gave a version of my Design Research 2020 talk for the 4th year Industrial Design class at QUT and then another version for everyone in Symplicit. I really like it, but I think it’s also a very strange talk. Everyone seems to like it though.
Friday: More work with the team working on the Icescape gig and some more bizdev.
What do I wish would be different?
As much as I’m an introvert, and coping well, it’d be nice to be out of iso.
Actually, it’d be nice to get back into the other timeline, where we didn’t have Covid-19.
Draw a timeline of what has happened
What were my high points?
Two high points:
- When my team started some great projects and I could tell a couple of them that they were coming off stand down.
- Having a spirited discussion with a client about an approach we were talking.
What am I sad about?
Sad? Nothing. It’d be nice to get back to normal but first we need to make a new normal, I think.
Who do I want to become?
Pretty happy being me, thanks Question Cards.
Which decisions am I not making?
I think I’m procrastinating on two sort-of-personal and sort-of-self-promotional projects. Not sure why.
Two spaces
Bringhurst has always been the final word on this for me.
The two-spaces thing has been a “debate” only in the way that wondering if the earth is round, or if man landed on the moon, or if you should smash up a couple of cherries and orange wedges while mixing an Old Fashioned, have ever been debates. One side has all the experts in agreement; the other side is wrong.
I always thought it was real
We’re one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.
I'm @bjkraal@aus.social on Mastodon