A Civilization-inspired tech tree but for the real life history of science and discovery. Inventions and discoveries presented in illustrated Magic-style cards.
Invention Cards 3.0: Stories
Last month, after a long hiatus, I showed invention.cards to a friend in SF and came away unsatisfied. Indeed, the work was not yet done . Three things drove this revision: It felt incomplete. The experience was built around T-shaped navigation, focusing on a specific card and showing only their ancestors and descendants. It was hard to see where you were in time, hard to feel the shape of history, and ultimately was far removed from the way a tech tree should feel . The connections matter more than the nodes. What's most interesting to me was not
The Tarot Cards of Tech | The power of predicting impact | Artefact
The Tarot Cards of Tech are a creative tool to help designers and technologists think about the outcomes of their products and services.
A People’s History of Tech
A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.
The Crooked Timber of AI
The philosophical perils of conflating discoveries and inventions, and how to overcome them
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
Leading scientific theorist W. Brian Arthur puts forth …
Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that w…
Telepath: building a new kind of computer
So, we made a thing: Let’s back up: for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with computers, fascinated not just by what they can do but what they could become. Like many, I took my early inspiration from science fiction. I dreamed of someday having something like the Enterprise’s computer. And why not? Science fiction has always driven scientists, engineers, and inventors to create real things that change the world.
The Periodic Table of Cognition
I’ve been studying the early history of electricity’s discovery as a map for our current discovery of artificial intelligence. The smartest people alive back then, including Isaac Newton, who may have been the smartest person who ever lived, had confident … Continue reading →
Ursula's list
Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.
Photography Prints by David Hawkins-Weeks
Photography prints and cards by David Hawkins-Weeks
Arts Technologies - Serpentine Galleries
Serpentine's Arts Technologies programme explores the impact of technology through art, research and experimental projects.
Technology without Industry
A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway
Developing creative identity
I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.
Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith
There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing. Not their technical achievements, though those are extraordinary. What is remarkable is where they came from before they ever touched a machine.
