Maienfeld SMI retreat

Our research group, grown to 12 people over the last year, met in Heidi land to discuss the research pipeline and the upcoming project. The retreat offers two days dedicated to discussing and spinning ideas. On some of the upcoming research projects we spend a lot of time just questioning the purpose and the direction where our work is going.

Usually, 2-4 researchers are involved in each project and the feedback from the whole group keeps them from drifting off into remote swamps and foreign fields. One of the experiences I like is that one person can, unexpectedly, shatter a card house of arguments that 5 people have been building for an hour.

Coffee helps.

The line

As a vegetarian, I frequently run into wild discussions about the why and how of not eating meat: fish maybe? NO! Last week I had lunch with a Texan who claimed to eat anything that doesn’t drive. Fair enough for his country where this line keeps most humans off his plate.

Some people eat pig but not horse and certainly no dolphins, for whatever reasons. I propose to draw the line simply between conscious beings and plants. Don’t go to Texas without a driving license!!!

Furniture pasta

Adrien Rovero blogged the making of the furniture pasta! Video included. Yummie.

MIT Portugal

The workshops took place at the INDEG/ISCTE campus until yesterday. We had Fiona Murray and Filipe Santos as discussants of our paper and they pointed to a number of weaknesses and at the same time triggered a long discussion among the audience. We’re very happy about the fact that the disscussants pointed to two ideas in our paper that fascinated them: the interaction between firms and certain communities, and renewal: a perspective that requires a vocabulary and a frame to convey the interpretive changes that accompany the knowledge exchange.

Azulejos

Fado

The MIT Portugal conference dinner was the Casa de Linhares, a Fado restaurant in Alfama, an old and beautiful part of Lisbon. I really enjoyed the music: they dimmed the light for every live music session interrupting dinner, and 4 different singers alternated between sessions à 3 songs.

Lisbon

During our, as always, long discussions about renewal, I learned a lot about wicked problems and the design approach to organizational issues. This paper introduces the wicked stuff, first described by Horst Rittel.