RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and infinite love. Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal.

— The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Breadth! Breadth! Breadth! The main idea is to open your mind and broaden your scope of knowledge. Creativity is a by-product of breadth. 10 × more than depth. Pulling ideas from arenas brand new to you and translating them into your sphere of interest is key. (This is not a mechanical act. I’m talking about subconscious novel connections that sneak in when you are, say, dealing with thorny issues.) Read fiction. Fiction is all about people and relationships. This and that cause your mind to expand and productively wander in ways that are invaluable, but of which you are […]
  2. But the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job. Make no mistake about that. Another point to encourage you. No doubt you have seen people who seem to spark ideas—good ideas—right off the “top of their heads,” without ever going through all this process that I have described. Sometimes you have only seen the “Eureka! I have it!” stage takes place. But sometimes you have also seen the fruits of long discipline in the practices here advocated. This discipline produces a mind so well stocked, and so quick at […]
  3. The key is to understand how intuition—specifically, informed intuition—actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images—really, data fragments—that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. These images simply stand out from the swarm of mental material that rattles around in our heads. They are the ones that are memorable. So the first rule of working with an image is: If you can’t remember it, don’t […]
  4. Human Centrality: A common view is that science has consistently been correcting our overly inflated view of our own significance. Stephen Jay Gould said, “The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.” But it turns out that we are central, after all. Our ability to create models—virtual realities—in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that […]
  5. The web is a living, breathing example of design evolution where nontraditional sources abound. Independent videos, blog posts, zines, podcasts—the list goes on, and these resources are often the quickest to embrace new conventions, evolving technologies, and current events. These topics don’t always make it into the “historical record” of published texts. — Inclusive Design Communities by Sameera Kapila Source: A Book Apart […]

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