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Tim Gasperak

@gasperak.com

I'm a designer committed to working with communities of people who want to make change together in response to our most complex challenges. ꩜ Strange Attractor LLC 🌿 Gregory Bateson enthusiast 🏴‍☠️ Punk rock fan

88 Posts129 Follower157 Folgt
Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · 4mo ago

I carry this quote by the late Barry Lopez with me everywhere I go. It serves as an evergreen reminder and encouragement for me to stay focused on what matters in the midst of darkness, contradiction, paradox, and loneliness.

A quote by Barry Lopez from Arctic Dreams: “How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · last yr.

So much of what I've been seeing and hearing in the “systems change,” systemic design, and change-making worlds in recent years amounts to a conflation of *skills* as *values* that everyone should hold. (1/2)

Erika Hall@erikahall.bsky.social · last yr.

So many people claim to be changemakers and refuse to give up the structural power afforded them by the system they say they want to change. It's why that bit of jargon makes me so itchy.

James Fairbairn@jfairbairn.bsky.social · last yr.

If you evaluate a technology’s ability to do a job “better than a human”, you have to include all the benefits that the human version of the practice created, in terms of social bonds, regenerative capacity and cultural meaning.

Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · last yr.

AKA abductive process or multiple description: how one context informs and describes another context. Nature does this all the time, and it requires circular feedback, among other things. Good luck trying to get a computer or an algorithm to think or assemble anything by abductive inference.

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com · last yr.

So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.

Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · 2y ago

"Wouldn't it be grand?" Pableaux would often say. So, wouldn't it be grand if people picked up his tradition of regular Monday red beans gatherings in his honor? In a world aching for meaningful connections, wouldn't it be grand?

Michael Erard@michaelerard.bsky.social · 2y ago

Coincidence, schmoincidence, but on Saturday afternoon I put a bag of red beans in my shopping basket, something I don't normally do. I gave a half a thought to looking for Pableaux's recipe and giving him a shout. www.foodandwine.com/pableaux-joh...

Michael Erard@michaelerard.bsky.social · 2y ago

From an intro I wrote to an editor once--it explains how important Pableaux Johnson was to my career. Without him I'd be living a very different life. I am absolutely gutted by this news & I'm so sorry that people in his everyday life in NOLA and elsewhere have lost this friend & community member.

How did I leave academia, in the end? The movement was slow and gradual, not in the sense that I didn't realize what was happening, but in the sense that I had a number of opportunities to think, and think, and think about what was happening. Above all, I could appreciate it: I had a distinct choice to make, I knew. I could pursue an academic career, or I could pursue a career as a writer, in journalism. Through a convergence of social networks I met Pableaux Johnson, a freelance food writer (who later moved to New Orleans, then to Louisville) who was the first person to lay out the choice. Immensely energetic and charming, he became the devil in my ear: you don't have to go to the academic route, with all the stuff you've got? You can go out on your own. Do interesting stuff, do your own stuff. Dude, you can choose your path. Don't get stuck trying to get tenure somewhere. As I had no academic devil in my ear whispering the contrary, Pableaux's message went straight to my head. He passed me a book, This Business Called Writing, which I read but didn't fully appreciate -- I had to hear its message from someone else. Another source of the same advice, though less devilishly, was Jim Magnuson, the director of the Michener Center for Writers, who recalled his early days as a writer working security guard jobs that would let him write as much as he wanted. What you need, he said, is "institutional juice." That is, the good stuff you get: the money, benefits, social interaction, a place to go that's out of your house. Then he delivered the kicker: most of the academics I know, he said, once they've gotten tenure, they never get back to writing what it is they wanted to write. A therapist was also very helpful (she had once given Annie Dillard a run for her money as a nontraditional undergrad at Wesleyan). Why not try it? she said. Give yourself a time limit, a year or so, and say, if I haven't made these goals, then you quit and do something else, but before the
Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · 2y ago

Abductive process is the language of metaphor, mutual learning, and evolution. There's little adaptive creativity without it.

Christian@christian.bsky.social · 2y ago

Abductive reasoning (aka abductive process) is core to effective decision-making and sustainable design. So much software sucks today because abduction is denigrated in engineering and management schools as creative or artistic, while induction and deduction are described as somehow more scientific.

Figure 1. Nina Bauer. Linearity vs. Circularity? On Some Common Misconceptions on the Differences in the Research Process in Qualitative and Quantitative Research, 2019. A diagram representing induction, deduction, and abduction. Induction (from Data to Existing Theory) and Deduction (from Existing Theory to Data) are grouped as Science. Abduction (from Data to New Theory) is grouped as Creativity.
Tim Gasperak@gasperak.com · 2y ago

Gregory Bateson: CONSCIOUS PURPOSE (i.e. actions taking the shortest logical or causal path; direct correctives; coupling of conscious thinking with our biological context; design) + DUALISTIC THINKING (i.e. mind/body split; mind vs. matter) = HUBRIS (i.e. pride, overconfidence, arrogance)