This has been shared and shared here, and now I'm sharing it. I'm going to buy her new #book from my local bookseller, then lend it out. Maybe I'll buy a few copies.

“Something big I propose in the book,” she says, “is that the whole idea of the ascent of man, his separation from nature, his inevitable progress towards the supremacy of industrialised capitalism, towards this supreme version of himself, is a weird detour from how most people, throughout most of time, have thought about nature and our place in it.” The mistakenness of that detour might show itself in environmental destruction, or it might show itself in an epidemic of loneliness, or in the scourge of corporate rapacity, but, once the imagination has woken up to it, says Solnit, “the change is deep and profound”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/25/rebecca-solnit-slow-revolution-far-right-cannot-tolerate

#RebeccaSolnit
#hope
#SenseMaking

Design's most distinctive cognitive contribution — abductive reasoning — remains largely confined to the studio, the workshop, the project timeline. We theorize it extensively (Kolko, Zingale, Dorst), we recognize it as the engine of design synthesis, the mechanism through which incomplete observations become structured hypotheses, through which uncertainty generates possibilities.
Yet when it comes to collective contexts — communities navigating complex territorial challenges — abduction stays trapped in episodic formats, limited by the well-known pathologies of participation: who gets to be in the room, for how long, with what resources, and whose complexity gets actually processed.

This is the gap we explored in the paper presented at the Italian Design Society last June with Michele Zannoni and Flaviano Celaschi. The Systemic Relational Insight (SRI) framework, born from my doctoral research at the University of Bologna, proposes a hybrid intelligence process — community and machine — designed to scale the abductive dimension of sensemaking across broader publics, longer timeframes, and thicker layers of data and knowledge.
The core idea: integrate qualitative knowledge from situated workshops with quantitative data and scientific references, generate candidate insights and submit them to community validation (bringing scale in the formula to reach who didn't attend). An insight here is never a single statement delivered by an algorithm. It's a cluster containing multiple versions, each traceable to its genealogy of sessions, voices, and contexts, each carrying different degrees of community consensus, data support, and scientific consistency.
That simple.

1/2

#DesignResearch #AbductiveThinking #Sensemaking #SystemicDesign #CommunityIntelligence #HybridIntelligence #PluralDesign

Apropos of nothing.

via @adapalmer

#history #sensemaking

Donald Trump, Cesar Chavez, and Bill Cosby all had things in common, it turns out.

Each shows how charisma and a carefully curated public image can coexist with—and even shield—private abuses for years.

#sensemaking

The corporate boardroom is increasingly reading like the granddaughters of a bunch of Boomers went to therapy, and the granddads are taking it out on employees, figuring the machine trained on blogposts will be less of a noisy, expensive hassle.

#sensemaking

Capital has become enamored with the idea of not having to pay for people’s health insurance and will find any way to not.

Having machines do the work is the obvious play for that endgame.

#sensemaking

#American oligarchs believing in and supporting the American Experiment is—indeed—considered…quaint.

The #GildedAge 2.0 is built different.

#history #sensemaking

Capabilities that have made the most advancement in #B2B #professional services, with regard to:

- proprietary well-governed data
- user workflows with embedded APIs
- hyper-niche ecosystem install base
- UVP driven pricing power

are

- audit risk models
- legal outcome prediction
- actuarial pricing
- contract analysis
- regulatory monitoring
- document intelligence

#sensemaking

To be frank, the idea of companies selling software needing lots and lots of headcount was counterintuitive to begin with.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-layoffs-block-jack-dorsey/686304/?gift=-Fv9R4P6cEEN68vsamhTNNyc0drLR_GNBH_DvAhP0iY

#sensemaking

“We have stumbled into the 21st century with our Stone Age emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology."

- Edward Wilson

#sensemaking