Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 102! An Innovation Resource for the Community...
Good morning enactive creatures of seasonal transitions,
I’m back from traversing the rocky shoreline of Eastern Rhode Island. It’s been another stormy night of thunder and lightning, which has gotten me up early – now sitting at the keyboard trying to type, but my fingers don’t seem to work and just xannot find yhe right keys – they are in all the wrong places…
One could see this as my penance for taking time off: a loss of embodied fluency with the taskscape of typing. So while it was wonderful not to touch my computer for ten straight days – I’m now seeing how our embodied entanglements and extended networks of enaction fade far too quickly!
I’ve always experienced how taking time off comes with the embodied “tax” of a few days re-attunement of fingers, concepts, the body, and the environment to get back into the swing of things. Sometimes I feel that the rupturing of daily practice is not worth it. I prefer to do a little bit of work every day to stay with the enactive momentum.
I wrestle with this exact issue in the gym too… I never do well with even a few days off… always takes a number of days to get back in the grove. Same for writing and drawing… Much rather work and exercise 6–13 days in a row and then take one full day off… I am significantly more attuned as an embodied being to the practice in this way.
Fast forward a few days later, Iain’s back from scrambling in the mountains and kayaking the fjords of Western Canada – now we’re both back rock’n – or at least attempting to get the synchrony with words rolling again.
For us, this is the beginning of a new season…
…and so this week, we are excited to have something completely different to share: our new and improved website. It is now far more usable and contains many more resources to address our primary questions:
We first developed and launched our website two years ago with the strong sense that a new approach to innovation was needed. Now after two years and many engagements, research experiments, organizational collaborations, workshops, keynotes, international partnerships, writings, diagrams, drawings, projects, papers, conferences, and many extended critical dialogs later – we have seen firsthand how much this vision has resonated with so many others who are also actively working to change how we understand and approach creativity, innovation, and change-making.
While we have always had as one of our primary goals for the website to be a true resource on all things creativity and innovation for the community – we never actually designed the website with this specific goal. Now after many months of work behind the scenes and under the hood, the website reflects this goal: we articulate a novel approach to innovation, define key terms, offer in-depth explanations of techniques, concepts, and tools, have a robust bibliography, and offer extensive ways to collaborate with us.
Below, we share a list of our website changes and improvements. We have done a significant amount of work under the hood and made some aesthetic changes – but primarily, the changes are to add resources that are more easily accessible to our community and readers. Here are the big changes:
If we were to call attention to one improvement in particular that has been requested by readers repeatedly, that would be adding site search. We hope this helps you find what you might be looking for! (Note: results will improve over time.) The site search function can also be found at the top of the page under the pull-down menu: Resources.
Added a link in the Nav Bar > Newsletters > Past Newsletters so you can navigate easily to an older issue.
Categories:
To help you find useful articles, we have spent considerable time categorizing each newsletter and blog post by adding 23 Category pages (descriptions for each are in the works and forthcoming shortly) – but now you can easily find everything we have on 23 key innovation topics:
Added 52 books to the bibliography - most of which are annotated – this nearly doubles the size of our bibliographic resources. We now have over 80 annotated books and are committed to growing this every quarter.
Interviews/Podcasts/Presentations:
We have done many presentations and workshops, and we’re making a concerted effort to publish as many of these as possible. On the blog page, you can now find a number of interviews, podcasts, and presentations.
We have combined the Newsletters and all of our blog posts based on the category in one easy-to-find location:
We have connected the glossary terms to relevant category pages for ease of navigation to similar content.
We have added a Work With Us page to be more explicit about how we can most effectively support your needs.
We have taken considerable time to adjust all the quirky design issues to improve the overall experience. One “small” example: You know when you do something for the first time and do it all wrong? Well, that’s the way Jason designed the newsletter volumes. Had to reconstruct every newsletter on the backend for all the above to be possible… (a monumental but invisible task).
Please dive in – enjoy the resources, share with others – and please please get back to us with any suggestions – practical, theoretical, or speculative – we would love to hear them all!
Well, that's it for this week – till next week…
Till Volume 103,
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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🧨 P.S.: We facilitate workshops and the accolades are overwhelming.
❤️ P.P.S.: Love this newsletter? We'd be grateful if you heap a bit of praise in the comments
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🏞 P.P.P.P.P.S.: This week's drawings in Hi-Resolution
📚 P.P.P.P.P.P.S.: Go deeper - Check out our book which is getting great feedback like this:
