Building a knowledge base An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com What is a commonplace?Curiosity spurred onInformation remixHow to be a genius commonplaceknowledge
Blogging with Version Control An Article by Will Darwin willdarwin.com I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens. ...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static. bloggingwritinginformation
How to Think About Notes An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com Thinking in terms of outputs Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden notetakingwritinginformation
The rational model of design Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it. The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community. Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI. In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design Large combinatorial spacesThe ordering of steps