№ 50 | Challenge & Opportunity Cards, Gaming for Understanding, Propaganda Headlines, File Over App, and “The Hero's Journey Is Nonsense”

№ 50 | Challenge & Opportunity Cards, Gaming for Understanding, Propaganda Headlines, File Over App, and “The Hero's Journey Is Nonsense”

Challenge & opportunity cards

These Challenge & Opportunity Cards can be “used to identify and map challenges and opportunities when adopting design in the public sector.” Free download. Have fun cutting out all these hexagons. 😳

While you're there, check out the other methods and tools from Service Design Lab, including the Priming Strategy Toolkit (cards!) and the Data Card Toolkit

Gaming for understanding

It's a TEDx talk, about Gaming for understanding. From Brenda Romero.

It's never easy to get across the magnitude of complex tragedies – so when Brenda Romero's daughter came home from school asking about slavery, she did what she does for a living – she designed a game. She describes the surprising effectiveness of this game, and others, in helping the player really understand the story.

I love the closing punchline:

And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves. We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so.

Propaganda headlines

Here's a great teardown (thread 🧵), in which the author looks at a single “propaganda headline,” and the tactics used “to intentionally obscure the truth, while still, technically conveying factual information.”

I wonder how we might turn these 5 tactics…

  1. Diminishers
  2. Omissions
  3. Improper Synonyms
  4. Grammatical Misdirects
  5. Unnecessary Details

…into a ‘look for’ deconstruction game? 🤔

File over app

Last week's find on “Local-first” reminded me to dig up this post/manifesto/philosophy “File over app” (in regards to notes and ownership). Yes, file over app!

“The Hero's Journey is nonsense”

I love a post that challenges—critically challenges—a popular framework (core to Mighty Minds is the idea of shifting our perspectives through various lenses, templates, frames, etc.). Anyway, The "Hero's Journey" Is Nonsense is a good, critical rejection, of Joseph Campbell's “thoroughly entrenched” ‘monomyth’ pattern.

Read more

№ 103 | ‘At What Cost?’, The Tarot Cards of Tech, Two Visuals to Improve Your Next Talk, The Mind’s Pendulum, Habits of a Systems Thinker Cards, Afrofuturism and the “future past”, and Four Ways Humans Relate to Technology

№ 103 | ‘At What Cost?’, The Tarot Cards of Tech, Two Visuals to Improve Your Next Talk, The Mind’s Pendulum, Habits of a Systems Thinker Cards, Afrofuturism and the “future past”, and Four Ways Humans Relate to Technology

Another dose of playful things to think with. Perhaps a little less playful… And a wee bit more somber and cerebral… But, all good things to think about! ‘At What Cost?’ Here’s your perennial reminder to think about the unintended consequences of the things we design, build, and use.

By Stephen P. Anderson
№ 101 | The CX FUNdamentals Toolkit, The Dabbawala Algorithm, High Agency In 30 Minutes, Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK), and Nick Sousanis Illustrates the Joy of Learning

№ 101 | The CX FUNdamentals Toolkit, The Dabbawala Algorithm, High Agency In 30 Minutes, Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK), and Nick Sousanis Illustrates the Joy of Learning

And… I’m back again, with a regular-sized dose of 5 playful things to think with. [And just in case you missed it, the previous mega-sized special 100th issue of Thinking Things featured dozens of things grouped into 11 themes. You should definitely check it out!] The CX FUNdamentals Toolkit

By Stephen P. Anderson