Much of the the value of the school, now in a free talk
I've been trying to summarize what we teach for years. Finally got it down to 1h30m!
I'm pleased to be launching two things today! There’s the talk, and there’s a related movement, to “rebuild society on meaning”.
The Talk
This 80m talk is my life's work! More than 200 of you have seen it in pre-release form. Thank you all for your help along the way! Hopefully, this talk will herald: a rebirth of humane tech; a growth spurt for meaning-aligned ML; and more. It also serves as an overview of the SfSD curriculum.
The talk is also available as an illustrated transcript. It consists of four “chapters”:
In the first, I say why market incentives often destroy what matters most; but my framing gives designers, founders, and ML people something they can do it about it.
In the second chapter, I define of “meaningful living” precisely enough to create surveys, metrics, aligned ML models, etc—so we can monitor whether systems are destructive of people’s meaningful living, and/or design systems to support it.
The third chapter gives a concrete design “toolkit”, developed over 6 years with hundreds of designers, to make things “meaningful on purpose” and to keep them that way. It’s been used to design everything from local events, up to social apps with millions of active users.
Finally, the fourth chapter covers problems with meaning and the social fabric that emerge at large scales—such as with global social networks, operating systems, app stores, and markets. And, again, gives solutions.
This week I'll be posting tweet threads to highlight the relevance of the talk:
to ML (especially "meaning-aligned ML")
to humane tech and social media reform (highlighting the talk's social media redesigns)
to the design of online communities
and to measuring meaning / wellbeing
I'll also organize some Q&As and jam sessions about these topics. The first is at The Stoa this next Tuesday (thestoa.ca).
(I'd love help sharing the talk—I made a sharing guide with quote tweet ideas, a schedule of twitter threads, etc. See especially the list of demographics to share with. And there's a bunch of launch week activities.)
The Movement
We've also launched a website and, on it, another talk, by someone I've been working with, Ellie Hain. Her talk is much more inspiring (but less nerdy and specific). Both talks end with calls to get in touch with us. We hope to hear from many of you!
—Joe