This week we are leaning into multiple metaphors: AI as a mirror, UX design as a window or room, and life as information. Plus: read about Michael Levin's upcoming presentation at the Imagining Summit, Helen's Book of the Week, and our upcoming events.
It’s easy to fall prey to the design illusion that because LLMs look sleek, they must be well-designed. But aesthetics alone do not equal design. As Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”
It’s curious that these two papers, tackling such similar ideas, came out at the same time. Is this coincidence, or does it tell us something about where the study of life and intelligence is heading?
What are the cause and effect of my actions? How do I know the effect of the small acts in my life? How can I identify opportunities to have impact that is much larger than myself? How can we make problems that seem overwhelmingly complex feel more manageable and knowable? How might we use the scaling tools of designers to tackle some of the world’s largest and most complex problems?
To answer these questions, we talked with Jamer Hunt about his book Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible. The book repositions scale as a practice-based framework for navigating soci al change in complex systems. Jamer is Professor of Transdisciplinary Design and Program Director for University Curriculum at the New School’s Parsons School for Design. Jamer was the founding director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program at Parsons that was created to emphasize collaborative design-led research and a systems-oriented approach to social change.
We’re big fans of Jamer’s book and have incorporated his concept of scalar framing into our work. We encourage you to check his book out as well and see how zooming in and out can help you frame complex problems in a way that makes them more addressable.
Learn more about Jamer Hunt
Learn more about Jamer’s book Not to Scale
Learn more about the Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons
Watch the Powers of Ten by Charles & Ray Eames
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The Artificiality Weekend Briefing: About AI, Not Written by AI
