Read more
Informationen zum Autor Charlotte Burgess-Auburn and Stanford d.school Klappentext "An empowering guide to creating a personal motto that sets intentions, increases creativity, and helps accomplish your goals, from Stanford University's world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the d.school"-- Leseprobe Recruit Yourself In Latin, manifesto refers to an action “given with the hand ( manus ),” an encapsulation of belief intended to be public and passed from person to person. You might be familiar with political manifestos like The Communist Manifesto or religious manifestos known as creeds (credo means “I believe” in Latin). These are methods for the expression of personal beliefs, but also powerful tools for public recruitment to collective causes and political movements. In Europe, after the invention of movable type and the adoption of printing presses, many more people gained access to reading and writing as methods of learning and expression. The broadcast and development of new ideas, discoveries, and beliefs accelerated the development of individual rights and liberties through successive movements for social change. Manifestos were both a proclamation of new ideas and an invitation to participate as a part of those movements. People have continued to produce ideas and exchange them as manifestos as far and as fast as each new broadcast medium can take them. Over time, with the addition of radio and television and the explosion of the internet, the landscape of publicly accessible ideas has become more and more crowded and anonymous, leaving many people feeling confused, jaded, and unmoored in a flood of manifesto-like content. Indeed, while the making of manifestos as a mechanism for selfexpression has flourished, it has also been co-opted in destructive ways—into the service of corporate interests as advertising and marketing mumbo-jumbo. Far worse, manifestos have been used at times by repressive regimes as the hammer of propaganda or as a litmus test of legitimacy and a means of exclusion. ? The time is right to redefine the manifesto as personal? for the present moment. Manifestos have been a tool for recruiting people to collective causes—political, religious, artistic. But in this age, where it seems like everyone is being recruited by everyone else every moment of the day, you need a way to recruit yourself to your own cause, a method for collecting and considering your own power to create and to make positive change in a world that sorely needs it. Creative work—the work of bringing ideas into the world, whatever kind they are—is hugely powerful. It is a particular kind of power: the power to generate, to make something where before there wasn’t anything. The power to improve, to build on the work of others, and reach closer to an ideal. The power to influence, to engage people in new beliefs, activities, and behaviors. And the power to change it all. That is the impact of design. Nearly every object and system you interact with every day has been designed. But that doesn’t mean each has been designed well or even with good intentions. Designed work tinkers with our lives through our cultures, our tools, and our environments, but also our attention, our emotions, and our capacity to think and to communicate. Well-intended and poorly designed solutions can produce outcomes just as horrible as those of intentionally malicious ones. I am certain that Facebook did not intend to design a product that would weaken American democracy, but many side effects of the “social network” are seriously antisocial. Emerging technologies are just that—emergent—which means we often can’t understand the full implications of what we are making. Making things better may have always been a part of creative work, but justice is a larger theme of this age. We are much more aware of how hard it is to design products and systems tha...