heathervescent

Slices of Life

My latest design future, Slices of Life, is about personal data, personal clouds and how we might have our data work for us in the future.  I'm really proud how this came out. 

I hope you enjoy it.

 

The Digital Asset Grid

After 6+ months of work, I'm finally able to talk about this amazing project I've been part of. The Digital Asset Grid is a new platform to enable safe and secure transfer of personal data assets. With control of personal data assets with the individual. It's a paradigm shifting idea. 

Here's a short documentary I did about the project, and the video, Slices of Life, that describes the scenarios will go live on Wednesday. 

Enjoy.

The Time is Now

If you are going to love me

Love me now, while I can know

The sweet and tender feelings

Which from true affections flow

Love me while I am living

Don't wait until I am gone

And then have it chiseled in marble

Sweet words on ice-cold stone

 

If you have tender thoughts of me

Please tell me now

If you wait until I am sleeping

Never to awaken

There will be death between us

And I won't hear you then

So if you love me even a little bit

Let me know it while I am living

So I can know and treasure it.

- Unknown, found in my mom's important papers

On Death, #2

Mom's cancer is back. It's fast this time. It's bad. I think this is the one, despite my attempts to pull a positive wildcard out of the field of possibilities. I know a way exists, but perhaps, we already walked that way, and that's what's lead us to here. Perhaps I pulled that card three years ago.

It's hard seeing her weak. Watching her body fail. I think how hard it must be for her. I think of my own. Aging every day. I remember my grandmother's death. Her body. Our dreams each evening. Every night I fight in my dreams. I rip out lips and wander angrily, anxiously through dream corridors. I wake myself in the might, fighting with an invisible adversary, trying to take my favorite book from my hands. 

I find this quote, from Terrance McKenna,

I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.

I've spent the evening with a group of my mom's friends. I am reminded of my own deaths. Not many, a few. Those times I've turned the wheel. Those were not final. Those were metaphors, methods to help me become a person I could only dream of. My mom's death is not one of those. She will be gone. 

Anti-Fragility, take 2

Anti-fragility, coined by N. Taleb, is the concept that some things benefit from bumpy, chaotic shocks.  

I've written about my theory tying Fragility/Efficiency, Resilence and Anti-Fragility before. Driving around lost in the construction filled, closed freeway ramp and slow driving cars of Portland, a new example of anti-fragility showed itself to me: being lost.

To be efficient, to know the best routes at various times - one must experiment, explore, fail, be frustrated, get lost in the streets of a city only partially known. 

When we talk about progress, results and success, you've got the best shot for certain high results when playing in the efficient/fragile bucket. That's where the 10 steps to X, 5 best practices for N, Timothy Ferris recipes for optimization fall. You can follow those recipes, but even then success isn't guaranteed. It's just a recipe that has worked for someone else.

Anti-fragility is the space of wildcards and emergence. Sure you can win big, but you can also completely fail. And there's a lot more failure than success. (Actually, to be honest, the values of fail/succeed are not applicable in this bucket - except they are used by people from the efficient/resilient value set.) But when you're trying to create this kind of space in your organization, most upper management expects some kind of solid results.

Enter Resilience. 

A middle ground. Resilience has solid results. It's optimized for values of stability, consistency and certainty. Which perhaps isn't very optimized. Like jello, or silly putty it's about returning to a stable state. The known. Certainty.

It's moving between all 3 that is interesting. Sure you can hang out/prefer one of those buckets. Many ideas/concepts/companies/products/industries move through all of these.