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When I watched my neuroscientist wife teach herself hardware engineering to adapt a piece of tooling to physically fit the rest of the tools used by her research area, it became real in a new way for me that huge areas of our insight and data about the world depend on small numbers of people innovating in their own quiet ways, often unrecognized. Scientific insight is not mass produced. 10 comments
@oliversampson @grimalkina There’s a similar passage on „the Art of Innovation“ about „Sally“, a travel agent who hacked her conference call using lots of phones with speakerphone mode, or two handsets held against each other, or private talk with a cupped handset. Tom Kelley says those kinds of people is what he found the most interesting because they describe „true“ needs and wants and what works and what does not. @oliversampson @grimalkina It’s still a quite corporate framing of the idea: „Empathy is about finding and listening to the Sallys of the world. It’s about rediscovering why you’re actually in business, whom you’re actually trying to serve, what needs you’re trying to fulfill. Companies periodically need an empathy check.“ But when even these people give that kind of signal… I find that poignant in of itself.  @grimalkina @grimalkina  @jonny @grimalkina chiming in to say that working with extremely smart grad students who had to stop and throw up their hands instead of doing science several times a day because of fucking proprietary software that profits off of disempowering them and then they blame themselves for not being computer savvy that experience among others changed me and motivates me @grimalkina This is so true and, I think, a strong argument for reinventing the wheel in science and diving into the tools you use at a minute level. They’re likely to be the result of a largely accidental process. |
Gregory's Server
@grimalkina #NassimTalen writes in #Antifragile how #Tinkering is how real progress is made, and (almost) never based on a theory-first approch. It's great to see it in action!