Antoine RJ Wright

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Even Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, probably the most influential advocate of human-centered design, has been promoting circular design as an imperative alternative, shifting from the isolation of solitary user experiences to embracing the complexity of interconnected systems, where context is king and the simplicity of linear approaches becomes obsolete.

…ind most products in the market today, needs to be questioned, subverted and overall decentralized. This anthropocentric way of solving problems has been great to address market needs, but fails to deal with the complexity of environmental needs, because it comes from a selfish mindset where the human is the center of everything and where everything should be easy to use, convenient and intuitive, at any cost and as fast as possible.

Interesting associations begin to take place when observing the connections between commerce, advertising, and privacy — the more they know about us, the less we know about them, and the more we seem to buy. A collective digital consciousness of our data footprint and metadata is needed and can be achieved through increased digital literacy, a healthy internet, and alternatives to existing business models.

Imagine the implications, accountability, and decentralized control that can arise from perceiving data as embodied, as naturally a part of yourself as your left arm. Rather than contributing to the hyper normalization of corporation use of algorithms and exploitative use of your individual and our collective data, by seeing our data as an extensions of ourselves, we can demand more ethical practices that we are in control of.

The concept of distributed or remote work is often decided up front relative to attributes of “how” or “culture” but in practice there is no way to avoid that the product you build (and what customers experience) is a product of the physical structure of your company. So the question is to start from what product you want to build and work backwards. I don’t think one can just discount the nature of communication and collaboration viz geography as …

While tools for tracking can address challenges, the real tool (that everyone hates) is building a product becomes less about who is doing what and more about “why are we doing what”. Transitioning to “why” means planning process beyond kanban. By definition that’s an HQ process.

The key challenge is that at some point the product architecture and user-experience gain enough depth & breadth that you have to think hard about who does what — this is a statement of capabilities of individuals as well as balancing workload. These early scale decisions have a dramatic impact on both the organization and also the product itself.