To apply natural order and our love of life to the way we create the world. To tap into the most ancient systems and patterns for wisdom as we build tomorrow.” - Adrienne Marie Brown, Emergent Strategy

Technology is in a constant state of emergence. But what about it is new? We are just finding new ways of adapting to age-old problems. The core of what this chapter gets at in my interpretation is that we are using these tools, technologies, skills, curiosities to discover what was always in front of us. To take the data quite literally at our footsteps and change it into action in the world.

The owners are there six days a week, and the store had been open for years, yet they had never noticed this behavior until they actually saw the data. [232]

But before we can do that we need to change our approach to prototyping to test these interactions. In this realm, there is no direct path of knowledge but similar to how everything is a system buried within a system, the skills needed to prototype for emerging technologies lies in developing a nested design technology skillset that gives you the technical tools and research structure needed to theorize and test in real-time. Emergent technologies will always sit at the forefront of what is possible and developing, so in order to design for them, our skills must as well.

How this relationship changes in designing for emerging technologies is that the materiality in which the designer is designing with the technology and data itself… you just have to learn them as you go and slowly build your skill set as you encounter those problems. [227]

“All of this imagining, in the poverty of our current system, is heightened because of scarcity economics. There isn’t enough, so we need to hoard, enclose, divide, fence up, and prioritize resources and people. We have to imagine beyond these fears. We have to ideate—imagine and conceive—together.”- Adrienne Marie Brown, Emergent Strategy

Our current technological thinking is dominated by a minority of voices creating the technological landscape that we mold our behavior too. It’s important that a diversity of thought is considered in who learns these skills and designs these products. As technologies emerge, I think the larger question than what is the “right” thing to enter our lives is Who is deciding what is right, what is disruptive. The author of this article seems to think that this is something that is decided or can be controlled. We can ensure, and we can’t be certain, that’s how we got to where we are now.

These products are entering our lives and we’re going to be certain that when they do, we ensure that they’re the right thing to enter our lives and they’re doing it in the least disruptive way possible. [236]

Furthermore, I’m not inclined to trust his opinion on this matter. Over the course of this reading, he constantly used his girlfriend’s disinterest in his work as a foil for his achievements. While this is only a mild form of sexism, I find it indicative of the underlying issues in the people deciding what is right and disruptive in this space.