Principles for 21st century living
I am not sure how you can make use of this, especially since it’s commonsense for the most part, but it’s interesting in all cases.
Here is a list of principles for the 21st century, from Joi Ito, who runs the MIT Media Lab:
1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.
Via BoingBoing
Craig
March 12, 2013 @ 8:12 pm
Three at random!
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
It’s magic. People just have to understand that, and accept it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
Only if you’re smarter than everyone else. If you’re dumber than a bag of hammers, it’s probably better to just do as you’re told.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
Sorry, but that’s a wrong answer. At least 90% of the real and meaningful innovation in the tech sector is and always has been done by 1% of the people working in the tech sector, and I suspect that’s true in every cutting edge creative industry. Design by committee and consensus of opinion are fatal to successful innovation, and in fact I think this item is at odds with other items on this very list! Perhaps he’s referring to the punditry and various other self-proclaimed trend setters that hang around at the periphery of creative industries? If that’s the case, then I’d say he’s right. Successful innovation depends upon predicting what people want before they know they want it and having it ready before anyone else does. You can’t do that by chasing what’s trending on twitter or the trade buzz. If what was going to be hot next was so obvious no innovation would be required.