Field log
Build logs, weekly notes, and field reports from the work of designing hardware, games, and programs.
In “Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer,” Wendell Berry, commenting on modern conservationist movements, observes, “The guilty are always other people and the wrong is always somewhere else.” This insight extends far beyond conservation, touching on the heart of complex systems problems….
Have you ever been stuck on a project and couldn’t find a way out? When I first started teaching game design at DePaul University, I discovered a book by Jesse Schell called The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. It introduced me to…
I’m rebooting my old podcast, This Should Work* with a new focus on innovation centers. Check out the first episode below. — In this episode, I’m thrilled to have Jake Juracka, the talented Senior Associate Director at The Garage at Northwestern University and my former…
Here’s a talk I gave on early work I’ve been noodling on. The basic premise is: all objects have affordances, computers have unique affordances, and what if we applied those concepts of computing and affordances (Janet Murray) to the selection of hardware components? CrowdSupply…
Belief requires trust and wonder. But, what happens when you’ve lost both? It seems like we’re in a time where both trust and wonder are at an all time low. Social media and fragmented networks have caused us to be more mistrustful and suspicious of…
You can spend your time on everything. Every job that comes your way, every person who asks you for a favor, every single task. Nobody’s going to stop you from doing, experiencing, becoming everything. Yet in becoming everything, we lose our selves. Perhaps to find…
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the…
We’ve been selling our house, and so I’m playing a few weeks of catch-up here. Friday links come first: — Disease isn’t something that just happens instantaneously, it’s your body being unable to fight off whatever’s happening to it. Welcome to “Your Body’s Never Not…
The world we live in today is built on top of an industrialized substrate that was created in the early 20th Century. From education, to business, to governance, we’ve been building on top of this substrate for over a hundred years without questioning it. And…
— Daniel Suarez has a great series of sci-fi books I’ve been catching up on. The first book in the series, Delta-V, is excellent and I’d highly recommend it. I got into Suarez’s work back when I read Daemon and then Freedom(TM), and can…