Blog

Over the last couple of months, there have been a few discussions and proposed ideas around fellowships, and indie research labs. For a few years, I’ve had the idea of a “consortium” where a few partners would support a yearlong research effort with some public outputs and some private reports, workshops, and the like.  Keep reading →

Jon Rogers explains how designers, smaller firms, and artists can create and re-orient products’ plots to provide citizens with more agency in their use of technology. As told to Peter Bihr in the course of an interview for his Getting Tech Right project.  Keep reading →

There are a lot of apps and settings in MacOS to manage notifications, timers, snooze, etc. However it would be a pain to setup everything, if even possible, to properly work by blocking-out hours. You can turn off all notifications and go to airplane mode but that’s pretty radical.  Keep reading →

How do you work? I think productivity gets somewhat of a bad rap, some people talk and write about it nonstop, for some it’s a way to optimize their workaholic tendencies, and sometimes it leads to too much focus on details, not enough on what you are actually trying to get done.  Keep reading →

Although I use various topic names to describe the newsletter, tweaking once in a while, re-framing how I present it, basically it’s always “here’s stuff I found interesting.” And yet I’m also always trying to determine (guess) what readers might enjoy, how each issue can make sense, and to find the overlap of where my curiosity leads and what might be more generally engaging.  Keep reading →

Revue is joining Twitter. The news has been making waves in the "newsletter world," this being only the most recent acquisition or investment over the last few weeks.  Keep reading →

My friend and collaborator Peter Bihr wrote that he thinks fellowships are the way forward. Basically, he argues for a lighter / more agile form of research than what academia and big R&D labs can accomplish, and believes that fellowships are an interesting option to achieve understanding in these edgy topics.  Keep reading →

This month’s topic was all researched and ready to be written, even though I was finding it hard to line things up in an interesting manner. Then I happened on a tweet, quoted below, and decided to write about what that brought to mind, and ended up going more personal than usual at the same time.  Keep reading →

Last summer I wrote a proposal which included some of the structuring and medium-term thinking and plans for Sentiers. That included the idea of doing four publications a year, on top of the weekly and member Dispatches. The idea would be to produce something zine-ish twice and something report-ish twice.  Keep reading →

I’ve recently come to realize that a good number of the articles I’ve shared in the last year could, when contemplated from a certain angle, be grouped together in a way I hadn’t planned on. I noticed that there’s definitely a “just enough” aspect to many of them.  Keep reading →

The remote work experiment has been ongoing, though some have gone back to workspaces, many are still largely working from home, and although the numbers have gone down, there’s still a good percentage of home workers who would prefer to keep this way of work most days, as long as kids are in school.  Keep reading →

With the current pandemic, lots is being written about open offices, work from home, flexible conditions, shorter weeks, etc. One of my favourite theories in that "field," the Eudaimonia machine, has been around for a few years and I was surprised I never mentioned it in Sentiers, so here are a few bits around the topic as well as some speculations.  Keep reading →

If you’ve been following the newsletter beat, you’ve probably heard that the buzzword of the last couple of months has been “bundle.” As in bundling together a few newsletters under one price, to feed off each others’ reach and prepare for the much feared newsletter fatigue. Here are somes things I’d like to push back on or expand, and a few other options.  Keep reading →

Having been a lifelong book and magazine tsundokist (not an actual word), having co-edited a print magazine, and now writing Sentiers, I’m always paying attention to various publishing models and experiments. With Walden Pond popping up a few weeks back, then Robin Sloan launching his Sloanstarter, and finally following an exchange on Twitter about zines, I changed themes for this Dispatch and decided to share some of the publication formats and concepts that have drawn my attention over the last few years.  Keep reading →

By now I’m sure you’re aware of the expression “software is eating the world” so I won’t dwell on the topic—it’s clearly happening—except to say the one of the interesting things unfolding in that process is that more and more “things” become digital or have a digital version, thus becoming more easily interoperable. Tools, methods, practices, skills become, at least superficially or in part, compatible from one domain to the other.  Keep reading →

Following a member’s Dispatch, further reading on the topic of the Metaverse.  Keep reading →

It’s a less-performative version of blogging - more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog. The distinction will come down to how you blog - some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly performative thinking and less captain’s log. So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking.  Keep reading →

Regardless, Ballard has been appearing left and right as I’ve been following and reading more futurists and discovering new scifi authors so he’s been repeatedly on my radar over the last few years. It feels like we’ve transitioned from “Gibsonian” to “Ballardian” in describing the current era. Since we seem to be living in Ballardian times, what better topic for the first Dispatch after this past March “decade”?  Keep reading →

Aside from the one topic on everyone’s mind, a related one is something I’ve spent some time paying attention to: distributed or remote work. As country after country and company after company decides to have people work from home, how to best do it while staying sane is a very timely question. Here are a few ideas.  Keep reading →

To feed a discussion about a potential get-together, a client recently asked me to gather some interesting event formats. After asking for pointers on Twitter, I was asked by a number of people to share my findings. I repurporsed some things from the report, fished some out of my “archives” and decided to first share all of that here with members.  Keep reading →