Link: Elon Musk’s Secret Weapon: A Beginner’s Guide to First Principles – Microlancer Blog

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“Meaning: rather than taking what already exists as the basis of our thinking, we break the problem down to its most fundamental truths and examine each piece. Even though a problem has already been solved, we start from the problem’s most basic elements to reexamine whether a better solution might be possible.”

“…Reasoning from first principles helps to ensure that you develop the smartest, leanest possible solution to a problem. It may even result in some astounding innovations. The downside is that it’s a much harder path than reasoning from analogy. A one-question problem now becomes a 100 question problem. But when you’re working on something that truly matters to you, this process of hard thinking will truly be worth it.”

Source: microlancer
via Diigo

Link: Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: The Dark Side of Technology

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“There’s a delicious paradox here: the very same technologies that bring us awesome opportunity and new possibilities are at the very same time bringing us mounting performance pressure, accelerating change and growing uncertainty. To truly harness these opportunities, we first need to acknowledge and deal with the dark side.”

Excellent piece. Look forward to the follow-on piece, steps to “harness these technologies to create a very different kind of world, one that turns pressure into opportunity and stress into success.”

Source: Edge Perspectives

via Diigo

Tapping into the Maker Movement

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When you hear the word innovation, what’s the first thing you think of? For me, it’s probably the Media Lab at MIT. With few constraints and an incredible collection of minds across not just information technology disciplines, but music, art, psychology and many others, they have masterminded hundreds of breakthrough inventions – everything from the first web recommendation system called Firefly to Lego Mindstorms to the $100 Laptop. But, increasingly, MIT’s Media Lab isn’t the […]

Documenting Design Decisions

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We previously discussed Options Analysis – our method for evaluating multiple viable technical solutions.  We also facilitate numerous smaller design choices at all levels of the architecture.  We often need to document these as “design decisions,” and use a common approach and format to document at all levels of design (conceptual, logical, physical, component, etc.). […]