From Bruce Sterling’s Well discussion on the 2007 “state of the world”:

Well, the fastest way to break up know-it-all preconceptions is to get outside of the stuffy confines of your own head and engage with the grain of the material. Travel will do that in a hurry: meeting other people, other cultures. And building stuff will do that,
too.

A two-by-four doesn’t care how glib you are.

I was talking with Adam Greenfield about this recently. He’s the author of the design-theory book EVERYWARE, while I wrote a somewhat similar design-theory book called SHAPING THINGS, and we were in a design school in Oslo doing some high-flown pitches about ubiquitous computing…but design students, instead of just circling catch-phrases and tucking them into a notebook, will try to *prototype* something… They try to invent and describe some coherent scheme that might actually *work for end users.*

As Adam put it: you talk to them and they actually *get up and do something.*

And we both find that very gratifying.

Indeed. Bruce is right, it was a very rewarding day, and I have the warmest memories of it. This was a lovely passage to stumble across today, kind of an unexpected treat – the usual thanks to Timo Arnall for making it all happen in the first place, and to the globally mnemotechnic Web for restoring it to me in a time and place that feel so far removed.