All Episodes
Displaying episodes 1 - 30 of 48 in total
E45: The offloaded brain, part 5: I propose a software design style
In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to...
E44: The offloaded brain, part 4: an interview with David Chapman
In the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. T...
E43: The offloaded brain, part 3: dynamical systems
Scientists studying ecological and embodied cognition try to use algorithms as little as they can. Instead, they favor dynamical systems, typically represented as a se...
E42: The offloaded brain, part 2: applications
Suppose you believed that the ecological/embodied cognitive scientists of last episode had a better grasp on cognition than does our habitual position that the brain i...
E41: The offloaded brain, part 1: behavior
Embodied or Ecological Cognition is an offshoot of cognitive science that rejects or minimizes one of its axioms: that the computer is a good analogy for the brain. Th...
EXCERPT: Concepts without categories
This excerpt from episode 40 contains material independent of that episode's topic (collaborative circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about col...
EXCERPT: Christopher Alexander’s forces
Software design patterns were derived from the work of architect Christopher Alexander, specifically his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. This ...
E40: Roles in collaborative circles, part 2: creative roles
The last in the series on collaborative circles. The creative roles in a collaborative circle, discussed with reference to both Christopher Alexander's forces and idea...
E39: Roles in collaborative circles, part 1
Farrell describes a number of distinct roles important to the development of a collaborative circle. This episode is devoted to the roles important in the early stages...
E38: The trajectory of a collaborative circle
Collaborative circles don't have a smooth trajectory toward creative breakthrough. I describe the more common trajectory. I also do a little speculation on how a circl...
E37: Resilience engineering with Lorin Hochstein
An interview with Lorin Hochstein, resilience engineer and author. Our discussion was about how to handle a complex system that falls down hard and – especially – how ...
E36: BONUS: One circle-style history of Context-Driven Testing
I was a core member of what Farrell would call a collaborative circle: the four people who codified Context-Driven Testing. That makes me think I can supplement Farrel...
BONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owls
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the s...
E34: /Collaborative Circles/, part 1: a teaser
Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the sta...
E33: Interview: Jessica Kerr on /Games: Agency as Art/
Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning ...
E32: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 3: expertise, panopticism, and the Big Visible Chart
The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improv...
E31: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factory
An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do*...
E30: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1
Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the m...
E29: Interview: Trond Hjorteland on a radical approach to organizational transformation
Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mi...
E28: /Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commons
I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a simi...
E27: /Governing the Commons/, part 3: Man, 63, seeks software teams, any age. Object: matchmaking
A short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways:1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to p...
E26: /Governing the Commons/, part 2: the key mechanisms
Ostrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to ...
/Governing the Commons/, part 1: setting the scene
This is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik...
BONUS: Seeing like a personality survey
My goal is to help you understand what it means when you see a headline like “Scientists find that people on the political right are less open to experience than peopl...
Personality and destiny
A summary of the "situationist" faction of personality psychology, which holds that behavior is strongly influenced by the situation. Knowing someone's personality typ...
This is not an episode (a diversion into what makes explanations good)
Not an episode that suggests ideas for people to try in software projects. Instead, I am reacting to the book /Communities of Practice/, whose ideas are not explained ...
Legitimate peripheral participation: the book and the idea
"Legitimate peripheral participation" is based on observations about how novices learn in the presence of experts. The novel bits are that novices learn better from fe...
/Talking About Machines/: copier repair technicians and story-telling
Julian Orr tagged along with ~1990-era photocopier repair technicians and made some observations that seem to apply to modern software development. This episode discus...
/Seeing Like a State/, part 3: the users, the clients
In this episode, I hope to give you some helpful hints about *actually* improving the lives of the users of the software you create. Or, if you’re the kind of “change ...
/Seeing Like a State/, part two: recognizing your High Modernist eidolon
We in software are prone to "Seeing Like a State". It's easy to adopt that perspective despite good intentions. How can you realize that's what you're doing?
