Category Archives: Rants & Opinion

Avon Reserve

By | September 3, 2012

There was a short opinion piece in the Press the other day about plans for the Avon River as Christchurch rebuilds. Read it here. The plan they’re talking about is broadly that espoused by the Avon-Otakoro Network, and envisions rejuvenating the damaged lands along the river (where much of the heaviest quake damaged land is)… Read More »

Some concepts in design

By | April 27, 2009

Following on from last week’s post on wicked problems, I got to thinking about the general sorts of challenges that occur in design, whether it be design of software, bridges, posters, web sites, or even social policy. It seems there’s three main types of challenge: Problem definition – exploring a problem space, identifying a particular… Read More »

Wicked Problems & Decision Making

By | April 18, 2009

Today I read a paper from 1971 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber about “wicked problems” – problems that are intrinsically difficult or impossible to solve in the sense that one can solve a crossword or mathematical proof, or win a game of chess. Wicked problems abound in policy questions and design, and it’s interesting… Read More »

Surfing the waves of existential contrariness

By | April 30, 2008

I’m surfing a rather strange mood right now. I got home from gaming 20 minutes ago, feeling strangely bemused and disappointed with the world, largely for broad social and political reasons than for anything one particular thing. I’ve been grappling a little of late with the troublesome conflict between ideas of social fairness and communal… Read More »

Internet video rant

By | March 30, 2008

While slowly uploading 3 years of email archives to gmail this afternoon, I spent a while poking about random video blogs following links from last week’s Epic-FU. While the content is amusing, it’s the fact that they even exist that really interests me – random people creating not only content, but regular shows, of quality… Read More »