Part of the Process

The Future Soon by K Rupp on flickr Last Friday was the last dConstruct (at least in it's current form). For the past ten years this has been an interesting design conference held in Brighton looking at the culture/technology intersection. As a Artificial Intelligence graduate the subject matter was right up my street and changed the way I look at things just a little. While at University I had a certain nostalgia for the golden age of AI in the late 50s to early 70s, to have been around while Winograd , Weizenbaum , Schank , Newell and Simon were writing the papers that founded approaches and I was studying all those years later. What changed after dConstruct was that I now almost wanted to have been born later , with advances like 3D printing, robot kits that retail for around $1,600, and 10 companies with self-driving permits in California it feels like an exciting time to be studying, creating and entering the job market.  Looking at my Twitter timeline, this doe...

In the past month I've been reading a lot and two particular articles caught my eye. The first article I found interesting was a case study by Suleimanagich  (2013) of how even successful implementations of new technology, e.g at the project level, doesn't guarantee success if the company strategy isn't correct.This is the story of how Kodak had invented a digital sensor before any digital cameras were available on the market. This seems to be a common assessment of Kodak's fortunes - they slipped up by not pursuing the innovation - for example "Kodak's Missed Opportunities" by Bergstein (2012) or The Economist's (2012) "The last Kodak moment?". So at this point in my journey I was thinking, why did Kodak fail? Which brings me onto the second article I found interesting this month. Avlesson and Spicer (2012) puts forward a stupidity-based theory of organisations, could this offer an explanation on why Kodak failed? Did Kodak suffer ...