Re: Nanotech brainstorming weekend

Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Thu, 4 Feb 1999 09:01:19 -0800

hal@rain.org (hal@rain.org) writes:
>The meeting will be organized as a "DesignShop" at knOwhere Palo Alto.
>The DesignShop is some sort of collaborative brainstorming methodology,
>and knOwhere provides a flexible workspace which can be reconfigured
>as needed. The web materials on this system (linked from the URL above)
>are pretty confusing. There is a book out about DesignShop, Leaping
>the Abyss, by two of the authors (not Drexler) of Unbounding the Future.
>Has anyone here read it?

I've read it. They put together a lot of little psychological cues to create the right moods for groups of people to solve problems that have been bothering them. It's primarily oriented towards helping large companies make important policy decisions. It isn't obvious why it works, but the testimonials sound impressive.
It isn't obvious that Foresight senior associates will come with enough agreement about what problems they are trying to solve for these techniques to be effective. How to build an assembler or how to prevent gray goo are overly ambitious for that kind of meeting. How to change the focus of CritSuite to make it more popular would be the kind of problem that would be more appropriate, but there will be lots of people there who aren't interested in that subject.

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