Spilling Ink #1 - A new chapter
This is Spilling Ink, the monthly newsletter from from Curious Squid, Dan Brown’s IA and UX design agency based in Washington, DC.
Dispatches from the deep
I’m thinking about liminal spaces these days. After we decided to dissolve EightShapes in mid-Spring, I spent the last few months in an in-between state, a transition from that to this. We set our official end date to June 30, but I began working on Curious Squid immediately. Any moment in that period was both a point of acceleration and deceleration.
We humans like drawing boundaries around things and vague or fuzzy boundaries make us uncomfortable. But if you put a system under a microscope, you see that every part of it is in a point of transition. Depending on where they are and what’s happening around them, some things are transitioning very quickly. By the same token, the state of transition is sometimes so slow it cannot be observed.
The truth is that transition makes us uncomfortable only when we pay attention to it, when we’re forced to notice it. After all, we’re living in a constant state of transition. Stasis, by contrast, we would find utterly alien.
And yet, with the turning of the month I have crossed a threshold, from that to this. It’s not just the usual turnover of systemic elements, not merely the march of time, but the deliberate and forthright effort to move from one to the next. In nature, animals shed their skin. With technology, we upgrade to the latest version. And with this? Starting a new company is a transition that’s both symbolic and de facto.
Change – explicit and obvious and deliberate – makes me nervous, but it’s a relief to have both feet (tentacles?) entirely in one place. And yet still liminal. The liminality here is different, not a transition from old to new. Instead a place for creativity and emergence and generative thinking, to see what will be. A place for curiosity.
Latest spills
Recent articles and posts
Serial Book Review: Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford (Introduction, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, conclusion)
Updating Communicating Design for the remote era
Old stains
Favorite writing from the archive
From June 2023: The Structure of Digital Design Revolutions
Great reads
In the few months following The IA Conference I’ve been educating myself about artificial intelligence. Besides reading Atlas of AI, these articles have stood out:
Matt Webb invents a word – horsehistory – to explain how embeddings work.
Meanwhile, Amelia Wattenberger uses embeddings to analyze sentences within a text to determine how concrete or abstract they are.
The Guardian reports that researchers used AI to analyze elephant calls, discovering that elephants have unique names for each other.
Upcoming events
August 2 - IA Book Club - Join us!
We’ll be discussing Closing the Loop by Sheryl CababaMark your calendars: September 20 - IA Playbook Webinar - Details coming soon!
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