Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2014

I’ve come to believe that another word for “interruptions” is clutter: A sort of mental clutter and time clutter that becomes a bad habit (“habit clutter”).

Lionel Tiger’s new book, God’s Brain (coauthored with Michael McGuire) offers a scientific and anthropological explanation that finally makes sense of the religious impulse.

Clay Shirky’s new post on The Collapse of Complex Business Models prompted me to some thoughts on the role of resilience within complex systems.

Reading Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s book, Trust Agents, helped me put a fresh insight about Millennials in place: Make your own game, the authors write, which describes a Gen Y characteristic that’s been bugging Baby Boomers for a while now. But the kids are all right.

Can a photo of a baby in a Hitler costume say anything valid about the nature of evil? In my response to Nina Maria Kleivan’s photos I argue it doesn’t, for it takes attention to context and circumstance, without which evil holds no power.

Low voter turnout, boredom around local government: officials are scratching their heads, trying to design public engagement strategies that reach the disaffected, including the Millennial generation. My take? “Go where they are, don’t expect to build a site or a ‘strategy’ that makes them come to you”

The tremendous natural beauty that surrounds us bestows a false sense of entitlement, although we’ve done nothing to earn natural beauty. Stewardship lets us earn it, but now Victoria must at last wake up to earning built beauty.

“Competing Values: Land Use and Public Consultation” (2/20 forum in conjunction with “Bamberton: Contested Landscape,” an exhibition at Open Space in Victoria BC) illustrates the need for design thinking to help bridge gaps between validity (outcomes favored by the community) and reliability (assurances required by developers and quantitatively-oriented planners and engineers).

A missing cat poster in Fairfield’s Cook Street Village makes a very funny and effective political statement.