Furniture
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The design of organisations and products
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Legal ops: We must innovate! We have earmarked technology budget to innovate!
JC: Great! How about some decent document comparison software? Microsoft’s comparison engine sucks.
Legal ops: We can’t use our funds on that.
JC: Why not?
Legal ops: Because it isn’t very innovative?
JC: Would it change your mind if I told you it runs on blockchain?
Legal ops: YES! Does it?
JC (pauses): Um, yes. Sure it does.
Sofware Vendor: Wait, what? No, it d —
JC (to SV, sotto voce): Do you want this contract?
Legal ops: What was that?
JC and Sofware Vendor (in unison): Nothing.
Stewart Brand has a great expression for the kind of technology that is so good, so effective, that you don’t really think of it as technology: the “invisible present”.
Technology which does integrate seamlessly into our lives doesn’t look like technology for very long: email. The Internet. Smartphones. Wikipedia. Google. We have moved on. We are looking at neural networks, AI, distributed ledgers, permissionless, decentralised currency exchanges.
It looks like furniture.
Things that persistently look like technology, we call “bad technology”.
O Paradox.