There is a large amount of verbal traffic around the term ‘human centered’ in modern discourses but little understanding or agreement on what the term actually means in practical terms.
Human Centering: Gaining focus and clarity
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Accidental Vagrant/Harold Nelson
Harold Nelson’s Substack blog reflects decades of research and consulting in systemic design. A former professor at Carnegie Mellon and the Naval Postgraduate School, he has influenced organizations worldwide. He co-authored The Design Way, a seminal book on design and innovation with Erik Stolterman.
Horst Rittel’s two matches inquiry
Horst Rittel’s matches—a reminder that categories or clusterings cannot substitute for, or stand in for, understanding and cannot assign value or meaning to assembled data.
Power Without Wisdom
Expression of the relationships between people and their created technologies, known in various fables or narratives, is essentially some variation of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
September Posts: Getting there from here
Catch up on Harold Nelson’s September posts on systemic pedagogy, think differently, and proactive designing (a fourth category of jobs).
Systemic Centaurs—Part II
Infusing or integrating AI technology into the functioning of teleological systems, replacing or augmenting human strengths, depends on the activities supported by concomitant degrees of freedom in each conjunction space.
Don’t miss Harold Nelson’s #RSD14 framing conversation on OCT 3.
think different
Universities are designed around analysis and reductive inquiry. Businesses function around departments of specialization. Governments are reductive in both stance and approach. These dominant strategies have all worked well for large numbers of people, but there is a growing unease about the dominant strategy.
Every High-Energy System Needs a Crucible
Harold Nelson: It is obvious that we need to reestablish new broadband designs of inquiry to supplement and balance the dominance of narrowband inquiring systems in a world recognized to be more complex and entangled than imagined, and more challenged by complex technologies than ever expected.
Systemic Centaurs—Part I
Harold Nelson: New technologies in general, such as personal computers, and more recently the emergence of so-called artificial intelligence, have become, or are becoming, prosthetics fitted to modern humans. But how well do these new prosthetics fit human nature?
the future starts now
Icarus, the 1933 World’s Fair, and the question of what technical progress shoud be in the 21st Century.
sudden wisdom, 3/3
Part three (the last) of a three-part exploration of fast thinking. The personal experiences presented here are examples of fast thinking Type B, which leads to sudden wisdom.
Sudden Understanding: Individual and collective 2/3
This is part two of a three-part systemic exploration of fast-thinking and slow-thinking. Their postulated binary model or schema is a convenient stepping off point for a deeper and broader exploration of thinking as related to design inquiry, particularly systemic design inquiry. Specifically, it takes a careful look at the design of inquiry for action to be followed by action in complex, indeterminate environments.
Thinking Amid Complexity 1/3
Systemic thinking brings breadth and depth to thinking, transcending the constraints of slow thinking and the emotionalism of fast thinking. Systemic thinking, in conjunction with systemic design, is a prudent and pragmatic means for dealing with complexity.
Action: Navigating into the future
We often realize we are stuck in an undesirable present. Advancing into a more desirable future is challenging. [via substack subscription]
Systemic Design as Born from the Berkeley Bubble Matrix
Harold Nelson leads the collection with an invited essay, Contexts’ first article, that helps place the footers and foundation into the field that has grown from design for complex scale and generations of systems thinking. The fertile ground of the 1960s consciousness revolution, the University of California at Berkeley, and what Nelson refers to as The Berkeley Bubble are central to the ideas in this essay.