Design Thinking Conference – Micro-Agri-Community
Bicycle Fix-a-Thon
The time has come to raise $10,000 for What If…?. If you can help, donate here: http://www.indiegogo.com/fundthewhatifllc. We will be eternally grateful and give you a something cool in return.
Startup Weekend
Matt Murrie and I decided to try to start What If…? as a business, so we went to Startup Weekend. We pitched the Conference to a tech group … and realized we’re probably at the wrong place. We eventually went away from the “What If…?” Conference to focus on an online question-asking, -critiquing, and -doing platform called Crowdsourcing Curiosity. For potential and hopeful growth, I will be quiet for now about that part.
Photos:
- Sketch of Museo, our venue
- Pitches
- Our lair (credit: Cale Sears)
- Our Business Model Canvas
- Panorama of inside our lair
- Closed shop for the night
BIF-8
Wow. This story looses a lot when it is not experienced. And I mean going to BIF. There were a number of excellent storytellers, each with their own tidbits of knowledge. Though, some were less about imparting knowledge and more about just telling a colorful story.
Here is the shortish version:
- Saul Kaplan: Our trusted Collision Curator
- Carne Ross: gentle anarchist, independent diplomat
- Robin Chase: ZipCar and BuzzCar CEO, not Peer-to-Peer, Peers Incorporated
- Andrew Hessel: genomic futurist working for Autodesk
- Darell Hammond: builds playgrounds so kids can play
- David Stull: found great musicians coming out of Camden NJ, all due to the music teacher
- Jeremy Heimans: a young badass, started many movements, left Oxford, left consulting, as a child was deeply concerned about world problems
- Sherry Turkle: treat people like people, critique your use of technology, don’t follow it blindly
- Jeffrey Sparr: helps children with mental illness express themselves through painting
- Marc Freedman: we should create a new age category between middle and old as our lives get longer
- Lara Lee: get over the five business fears – losing control, failure, the unknown, the truth, success
- Dries Buytaert: made Drupal
- Tony Hsieh: moving Zappos.com headquarters into the community
- Nick Lowinger: young kid that gives shoes to kids and parents in homeless shelters
- Hillary Salmons: created a platform for Providence that connects middle schoolers, to community educators, to city resources to build crazy-interesting after school programs
- Valdis Krebs: connected BIF Twitter users, and using algorithms, told the audience who should meetup to have serendipitous conversations
- Tom Yorton: teaches groups about improv and its analogy to how we work
And that was day one.
- Teny Gross: violence is bad, costly, and ridiculous
- Susan Schuman: superpowers are pretty super
- Dave Gray: the connected company
- Felice Frankel: “make me look, make me understand” regarding knowing through drawing
- Nancy Schlichting: healthcare is … complex, do cool things
- Mike Harsh: GE Medical
- James Gardner: can you predict innovation?, he (comically) can’t
- Jeff Lieberman: What if now is the most important time in peoples’ lives?
- John Donoghue: brains are almost as crazy as he is awesome with neuroscience
- Brandon Barnett: Intel innovation incubator
- Carol Coletta: (I zoned out a bit and thought about What If…?, oops)
- Rachel Shuster: 16 year old badass, kids should be in organizations that affect kids, duh
- Simon Majumdar: Iron Chef
- Beth Coleman: x-reality, who do you want to stay up with?, cultural alchemy
- David Macaulay: How Stuff Works crazy awesome narrative
- Bill Taylor: companies of the future (1) offer something that is hard to come by, (2) built around an idea, and (3) are intensely human
And that was day two.
Day three: we did a workshop back at the BIF headquarters with Alexander Osterwalder and Saul Kaplan on business model innovation.
Regarding the photos:
1. Their letters
2-4,8. Our venue
5. Lunch
6. Hillary Salmons
7. One of the many illustrations of the talks
8.Downstairs of our venue
9. Workshop day
10. Trains are BOSS.
All in all, this post does not do justice to what I want to remember. This was a pretty sweet event.
I was alive before…
The other day I started to wonder: what will I tell my kids or my grandkids one day? What will I tell them I was alive before?
- I was alive before kids made organisms in their garage for fun
- before programming was done by the young and the old
- before Arduino was a household name
- before cars drove themselves
- before computers were cheap
- before computers were quantum-computing
- before computers talked back
- before everyone cared about their shared resources, their climate
- before comprehensive healthcare
- before the internet was ubiquitous
- before the majority of people were online
- before our buildings sensed and listened to us
- before artificial intelligence
What are you alive before?
I got accepted for a full scholarship to the BIF-8 conference!
From their site:
“
Inspired Conversation
Two days. Thirty storytellers. Over 400 innovators, troublemakers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and transformation artists.
BIF-8 is a national gathering of amazing people who are driven by their passion, creativity, and smarts to create value in entirely new ways. Believing in the power of stories to change the world, the BIF Summit is a storytelling jam, peppered with tales of personal discovery, innovation, and transformation.
Now in its eighth year, the BIF Summit has earned it reputation as “one of the top 7 places to watch great minds in action” (according to Mashable). The summit provides participants with the space to be curious and crazy, get inspired, and collide with unusual collaborators.”
So I wanted to say thank you again to the many people who helped support me this summer.
Thank you to everyone who sent money in via Indiegogo.
Thank you to people like my grandfather who paid for other things like my plane ticket.
Thank you to my girlfriend who supports me in the things I do.
Thank you to my mother and Sandy for helping me financially multiple times times this summer.
Thank you to both the Harvard Career Discovery Program and the Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy for accepting me and showing me so much in the fields of urban design and philosophy.
Really, without all of your help, everyone’s help, I would not have been able to travel and have so many amazing experiences. I can say that my summer has been fulfilling (and it isn’t over yet). I look forward to the adventures we will have together in the future.
Andrew R McHugh
P.S. Cards and emails are on their way.
My week at Rutgers was really cool, basically philosophy summer camp.
We got the chance to read authors then meet them the next day and ask them questions about their works. We read things on
- explicatives and pejoratives with Luvell Anderson (e.g. John fucking forgot to file the case.) It was a fun paper to read, Hom on Pejoratives if you are interested.
- more philosophy of language with Lepore on Poetic Imagination and Leslie on Generics
- epistemology and metaphilosophy with Dotson
- continental approaches with Frankowski
- philosophy of race with Blum and Morton, though Dotson and others brought up race and other potentially discriminatory factors up multiple times throughout the seminar
- philosophy of law with Husak on Intoxicants and Culpability
- and ethics with Garcia on The Virtues of Natural Moral Law.
Beyond readings we hung out with professional philosophers, philosophy grad students, and mostly other undergraduate philosophers. So we talked a lot. It was refreshing to be in that atmosphere again. You know the one where you just accidentally find yourself on a train talking about materialist accounts of the universe?
We also scuttled over to New York City, had a filling meal at every meal (they really overfed us), learned a great deal about philosophy grad school, and went to a jazz concert with Kenny Davis.
Regarding the photos:
1-2. Sketches
3-7. New York City
8. Our last supper
9. Our last rowdy gathering
10. Our last photo session
Weird Things in Cambridge/Boston Volume 2:
- Pooh Bear squats on campus.
- I know you can read what that says.
- If you read the last one, you can read this one. This one even has a picture!
- A semi-graffiti-art installation. This was outside the studio we were in.
- Note the writing on the bottom left corner.
- I was blown away by these outdoor city toilets. It is amazing.
- City on the fender of a bicycle.
- I forget who this is (and seem to be too lazy to look it up). It is on the outside of Boston City Hall. I’m guessing it is a photo of a mayor.
Life without single malt scotch is not worth living.”
— David Schrader // Executive Director of the APA, Rutgers Summer Philosophy Institute, 02012
I’m at the Rutgers Sumer Philosophy Institute and it’s pretty neat-o.
The first day, Sunday, was mostly meeting the other students. There are 17 of us, looks to be 50% male - 50% female, there are a few philosophy grad students, a few philosophy professors, and the Executive Director of the APA has been hanging out with us too (and everyone is very personable).
Regarding the photos:
- KC Airport
- When I walked in I was like: “What?, Rutgers has a mini hotel?” (We stay at a Rutgers mini hotel by the way.
- Notes on Garcia’s talk on natural moral law + a sketch of the room we’re in.
- Notes from Schrader’s talk on the APA (he is the Executive Director).
- Group photo with Schrader! (Kudos to @SAPS_Philosophy on Twitter)
- A “Room” in the bathroom.
- A “Fat Bitch”. It was baguette-like bread + fried chicken + mozzarella sticks + french fries + ketchup.
A mid-career average philosophy major is outdoing the mid-career average business major in terms of salary.”
— David Schrader // Executive Director of the APA, Rutgers Summer Philosophy Institute, 02012
Weird Things in Cambridge/Boston Volume 1:
- Look at what the paw is holding.
- Original Gutenberg Bible. WTF Harvard?
- Dorm kitchen sign.
- It was the explicit goal of our instructor to have a “money shot” on our boards.
- Ants cleaning up a mess by my door!
- Bathroom 101.
- I found this in the hall one night after coming home from studio.
- This is dangerously awesome.
