Artefact 244
Bees, T-Shirts, Singing, Writing and SXSW London
Hello
Every time I write ‘next time on this newsletter’, it seems the world shifts and new things take priority or interest.
So whenever you read ‘next time’ on here, let’s just all agree we know it means ‘at some point in the uncertain future’.
WHICH MEANS: more on the Dubai Future Forum, and our workshop on the Declaration for Future Generations with SOIF, another day.
Today, you get this lot…
Bees @ The Steps Collective
The STEPS Collective approaches its final month of an experimental year-long trial. It stands for Show The Easy Place To Start, and focussed on regenerative practices, and whatever that meant to practitioners who might show others something that helped them start.
This week, Rob and I recorded a discussion with Algy Falconer around the idea of here is the easy place to start, where we each talked about a green space near us we had been imagining next steps for.
The conversation winds its way through bees, farming, community, treeplanting, urban design, roundabouts, Biodiversity Net Gain, Strategic Design and much more.
The final installation of The Steps Collective for the year happens on Wednesday 11th at 3:30pm, and is called “All I Want For Christmas Is An Easy Place To Start”.
If you’d like to, come along with a thing (e.g.. a book) to share that was your ‘easy place to start’, or just rock up and hear from other folks what theirs was.
Register here:
All I Want For Christmas Is An Easy Place To Start · Zoom · Luma
Our final event of the year comes just in time for the last minute additions to your Christmas list. Come along with a book, object or anything else which…
T-Shirts from the PAST of the FUTURE are here NOW
This started as a joke on a slide at the RCA Design Futures Symposium earlier this year. But now… they are a real thing.
You can get them from the Artefact Shop, and half of all profits go to Teach The Future, a global non-profit movement that promotes ‘futures literacy’ as a life skill for students and educators.
There’s great news for those of you in the UK - there is free T-Shirt shipping all weekend until Midnight on Monday.
Christmas shipping deadlines:
US, Canada, Japan - Sunday 8th December
Europe - Wednesday 11th December
UK 1st Class - Tuesday 19th December
Zenko - The Everything Everywhere All At Once Supercut
I gave this talk at Smashing Conference in Antwerp in October, and recently the video’s gone up too. It is the punchiest and probably best articulation I’ve created of taking Stuart Brand’s Pace Layers into the original Zenko Mapping construct, and then into the new Zenko Systems form too.
Also, the glorious venue, The Bourla Theatre, was also honoured by getting the room on their feet to sing a line from Frozen 2…
It was definitely a speaking career highlight. If you think this could be relevant for your conference or company, then happy to tour this talk next year too, be it in-person or online (paid only, obv.).
Email back if that’s of interest.
Writing in the age of AI
I’ve been using Bluesky quite a bit, now that I’ve deleted Twitter. And trying out what it’s like to craft micro explorations there. The following was a series of five ‘skeets’ (no, seriously, let’s not call them that), that I thought was worth sharing here too.
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A thing @nicksherrard.bsky.social said this morning has been nagging me. “Maybe we’ll just write much less. Video with AI tools to edit and make look nice will take over.” This evening I picked out this from Moyra Davey’s ‘Index Cards’.
It’s attributed to Virgina Woolf, remembered by Davey.
We learn to lean into (or at least live with) that liminal state, as you wait for the right collection of words, concepts, energy and ideas to come together.
The wait, as Woolf/Davey describe it, is not a workless one. The net is not preformed on a production line. The weaving is the work.
Weaving the net happens hidden in the recesses of the brain, and as much as science has been uncovering new understanding in what might be happening in there, our inner functions remain opaque.
The ‘drop’ of the net, then, is waiting for your own work to reveal itself.
The other ‘net’ in this conversation is the Artificial Neural Net, inspired by one depiction of how we think we think.
Study shows that the way the brain learns is different from the way that artificial intelligence systems learn | University of Oxford
Researchers from the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit and Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science have set out a new principle to explain how the brain adjusts connections between neurons
Which is a bigger discussion that I’m getting into now, save to note that
1. Here we find the net again
2. We are no longer weaving it
What a waste it would be if we started to write less as a culture.
Instead of reaching out to feel for just the right word or two, we simply submit to system which knows all the words ever used, and statistically spits out an average approximation.
Instead of waiting for the net to drop.
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A talk with Zoe Scaman at SXSW London
Zoe Scaman got in touch a few weeks back with a really interesting and compelling idea for a talk; what happens when you look at the crossover between Zoe’s brilliant work exploring communities and fandoms, but direct it at the need and opportunities for regenerative transformation I’ve been looking into this year?
Cue much to-ing and fro-ing of ideas and narratives, until we got to a point where we thought we had something really compelling to introduce.
If you’d like to hear more… you’re going to have to vote for it!
It’s quick and easy to sign up, all support very much appreciated.
Right, that’s it for now… I’ll refrain from writing ‘next time’ again, as it will be as much of a surprise to you as it is to me, I’m sure.
ttfn
John V Willshire