Travels of a Thinker

Photo

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 09:24:58 -0500

Design Thinking Conference –...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:01:27 -0600

Design Thinking Conference – Micro-Agri-Community

http://prezi.com/ql1oijazjgkt/design-thinking-moag/

Bicycle Fix-a-Thon

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 17:50:50 -0600

Bicycle Fix-a-Thon

The time has come to raise $10,000 for What If…?. If you...

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 09:23:00 -0600

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...

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:15:39 -0500

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....

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 23:57:00 -0500

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...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:50:00 -0500

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...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 09:50:00 -0500

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...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:00:21 -0500

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...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 08:18:11 -0500

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...

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:54:10 -0500

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."

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:58:28 -0500

“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...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:09:34 -0500

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..."

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:34:00 -0500

“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...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 11:44:29 -0500

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.

I’m not dead! I’m in Kansas City seeing my...

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:17:13 -0500

I’m not dead!

I’m in Kansas City seeing my girly-friend.

I’m working on thank you cards on for my friends who helped send me to Harvard as well as my final posts on my Career Discovery experience.

~~I’m~~ I’ll see you all soon.

Tonight is the last night I’ll be working on things at...

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:45:33 -0500

Tonight is the last night I’ll be working on things at Career Discovery. Here is a preview of my three week project.

It was 4am.

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 03:50:07 -0500

It was 4am.

Welcome to the GSD.

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:58:24 -0500

Welcome to the GSD.

By the way, I am going to the Rutgers Summer Philosophy Institute

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:53:00 -0500

In addition to this Harvard program, I applied to two philosophy programs. One was at the University of Colorado Boulder and the other was at Rutgers. I didn’t get into the first, but I found out a few weeks ago that I got accepted into the second. Then I kind of forgot to tell anyone. This will be a busy summer.