Technology often advances at the margins, where new problems challenge people to adapt old tools or to make new ones. (See also Hybrids (2): combinations… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
I’ll be coming back to this in future posts, but for now I’ll just highly, highly recommend this documentary tracing the history of writing presented… Read More »Recommendation: BBC’s The Secret History of Writing
Elon Musk isn’t (just) building cars at Tesla. He started by building a car, but the end was never the car: the end was a… Read More »The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change
In case you’ve missed it, the quality of PowerPoint’s automatic design recommendations has been getting better and better over the last few years.* This latest… Read More »Design Matters (11): PowerPoint Wizardry
Bad old business* says, “How can I maximise profit? I will use up the resources available to get as much as I can.” Naive charity… Read More »Generous, Reasonable, Sustainable; or, Goldilocks Pricing
The thing you’re working on is (I hope) very useful, and sure to make a difference if the right people use it. But will they… Read More »Design Matters (10): Your iPhone Moment
Writing as Infant Technology … the thing about new technologies… is that it takes several generations for us to decide what they’re good for. They’re… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
We often think of writing (and reading) as primarily a matter of culture and education, which obscures its position as one of humanity’s most transformative… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn
In reality, what more agreeable entertainment to the mind, than to be transported into the remotest ages of the world, and to observe human society,… Read More »Children in Understanding: David Hume on Reading (history)
Anything by Steve Blank on Startups is worth your time – especially if you work in a sector where people don’t think in terms of… Read More »Steve Blank on the four stages of Customer Development