The Design & Critical Thinking Community update

Hi everyone,

It’s been some time since the last update! Here’s what happened on the thirteenth week of 2022.

On Tuesday 29 March, we continued our exploration of the theme “becoming better designers” through the keyword “data”, and what it means (or not) to be “data-driven”. We clarified the different kinds of data (explicit, implicit, qualitative, quantitative) and the importance of the context to make sense of them. We also discussed the ethics of using data, how they are collected and to what end.

On Thursday 31 Mars, we discussed perfectionism as a content creator and how to “leapfrog” into action. We also discussed systems thinking and design, and the knowledge economy related to design.

On Sunday 3 April, I published a critique of Systemic Design as a response to the event (in French) “Discover the Systemic Design” organised by Le Laptop.

Find below some links & resources shared in the community’s Slack.

Wish you a wonderful day and see you next week! 👋

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.


Shared & written by @SidneyDebaque 👏👇

Design is about facilitation, not creation
Design is about facilitating interactions between systems, not creating artefactsuxdesign.cc

🎉Congrats to our friends at Field.so for their successful launch 🚀👇

Digital Headquarters for Product Leaders - Field
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Field is a game-changer! Field gives us…field.so

Shared by @VinishGarg with the following question:

How will they draw a line between ‘AI generated’ and ‘AI corrected’, or ‘AI edited’, or ‘AI fetched’, or ‘AI enabled’? For example you can manually write this sentence — “AI generated content is ________ by Google”, and then an AI fills in ‘banned’ in the blank space. Is it AI-generated?

Google Says AI Generated Content Is Against Guidelines
Google's Search Advocate John Mueller says content automatically generated with AI writing tools is considered spam…www.searchenginejournal.com

Shared by @CorinaLupu with the following comment:

Great article about the fallacy behind statistics. If you’re bothered by the length of the article, scan through the history and read carefully starting with here ” To get rid of the stain of eugenics, statistics needs to free itself from the ideal of being perfectly objective” One precision, the writer of the article has a PhD in Mathematics and teaches Philosophy of probability and statistics at University.

How Eugenics Shaped Statistics
Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers. In early 2018, officials at University College London were shocked…nautil.us

Shared by @PascalWicht with the following comment:

Shenzhen is 17,5 million people.The degree of social coordination and engineering to manage such a scale.
The ripple into global supply chains.
The compounding effect on the reste of the permacrisis.

China locks down province of 24m as new Covid infections rise
China's government has ordered a province of 24 million people into lockdown as it tries to contain a Covid-19 outbreak…www.theguardian.com

Shared by @(Kevin)SkepticalDesign

Design Journeys - A Systemic Design Tourbook - Design Dialogues
Kristel Van Ael and I completed a year-long project for this special book, designing the first practitioner handbook…designdialogues.com

Making Things Better (With Enabling Constraints and POPCORN)
Most change efforts fail, even when experienced people are involved, and even when the environment is relatively…cutlefish.substack.com

🍻Join the community on Slack for more! https://join.designcriticalthinking.com

Thanks for your time & trust! 🙏

Kevin from Design & Critical Thinking.