Good Morning ice crystals, frost heaves, snow flurries and cold snaps!
We hope that you had a wonderful solstice celebration! We got all bundled up, built a big fire outside, poured a glass of good whiskey and dwelled in the event.
Now for others different holidays are coming right up. And in the long nights of winter while we do like to get out (last winter we were out sea kayaking and camping in a snowstorm— this year, not yet…), it is a good time to be inside testing out things in the kitchen or catching up on reading by the fire.
So for this week we are really excited to announce that we have finally returned to working on our annotated bibliography of books that are critical to our practice and approach. We have been asked by many to supply such a list and have kept putting it off until now.
Part of our hesitancy is how big an undertaking this is — we are deeply influenced and shaped by so much.
Additionally, we are also loath to focus too much on books. Books do matter, but they never matter alone — they only matter as part of some meaningful experiment that you are undertaking. Doing connects to reading and that folds back into an experimental practice as a relay.
Books are not a fixed repository of knowledge but tools that are open to inventive reuse — the way in which one can use a shoe to open a bottle of wine. Some books were useful to us only in one context and when we returned to them later they no longer glowed and radiated towards any use. Others seem to really matter over quite some time.
For creativity and innovation, we do not subscribe to the model that there is a fixed cannon that one must be read. Sure, for us there were books that became necessary and critical — and in our annotations we make this visible, but take this list how you will. All we ask is, be experimental — put concepts to work, experiment and change things.
A final note on this bibliography — it is just the first drop of books. It’s a limited selection — we will be adding more over the coming weeks and months (we will keep you in the loop). This first selection is more philosophical in nature, but they will not all be this way.
As always we would love to hear your thoughts and experience on books and anything else.
Have a wonderful week — enjoy your holidays and traditions — till next week!
Till Volume 68,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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