Design

Balance

A Quality Management System is often represented as a pyramid. Which is a relevant analogy. It has some “depth”, it is not a flat structure, and it matches well the hierarchical nature of many human thinking processes, of organisational structures, and of many information system paradigms (e.g. folders/subfolders).

Consultants and other experts who use this analogy typically describe from 3 to 6 levels. All these options are valid. A QMS does not have - by essence - 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 levels. It is a design decision, not an analytical result.

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Workflows

Workflows

The invention and spread of writing did not turn everyone into a literary creator. Neither did the printing press, typewriters, home printers or word processors. The democratisation of home studios, electronic music equipment and pro-quality plugins did not turn every bedroom muso or DJ into Jean Michel Jarre or Deadmau5. Like Jordan Tanner @jrdntnnr explained to John Flowers, “having the latest, flashiest Nikon camera […] doesn’t automatically make you a professional photographer”.

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Creative August

Diapason’s resonances this past month

CreativeAI_Sydney

I just received my invitation to DALL-E 2 and have started playing with it as you can guess from the images on this post. I haven’t used Midjourney and Gaugan yet. Beyond the “fun” of it, I have been blown away by the quality and depth of some of some of the artworks I have seen recently, like this journey or this landscape.

I am so looking forward to explore this field further at the upcoming Creative AI Symposium. Prof. O. Bown has designed an exciting program with many talented artists, researchers and practitioners over 2+ days here in Sydney (and online). Free registration here. I am honored to chair one of the industry panels where we will hear more from Tomasz Bednarz, Johna Barthelemey, Bhautik Joshi and Jess Edwards

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Ethic Questions

Linkedin, Digital Health and Ethics

The development of self driving cars has shine a bright light on the tramway challenge, which has reached meme status.

The digital health revolution is no different and has created gazillions of ethical challenges. You can call that a goldmine of ethic questions, if you like your glass half-full or are a professional ethicist. Or you can call it a minefield, if you are an entrepreneur in health tech, or an investor backing such a venture. Ethics-wise, healthtech does not play in the same league as another regulated industry, miltech. The concepts of risk and benefits are used in both leagues, but with meanings that are not compatible. Health tech does not play either in the same league as “plain” tech (aka YC). The concepts of risk and benefits most of the time share now compatible definitions, i.e. use roughly the same axes to describe their space of operations. But still, the benchmarks and values measured alongside these axes differ widely.

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Creative history

This fascinating article explains very well how pareidolia combined with the fire lit environment of a paleolithic dwelling could have given birth to different forms of pictorial art. The hypothesis is highly relevant and the story is easily envisioned ; the aura of a campfire and its impact on our mental state is undeniable.

I’m curious about the statement that (at that time) “huge amounts of time and effort would have gone into finding food, water and shelter, it’s fascinating to think that people still found the time and capacity to create art”. A lot of paleoromantic think otherwise. I need to dig a bit more into that (starting with this one). The statement comes from the Neuroscience News article, I could not find a similar sentence the paper itself.

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Pebble

Great article by Eric Migicovsky, founder of pebble.

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TRIZ

Brilliant example of Innovation. Moving our energy grids away from fossil fuel comes with many challenges, among them the storage of energy at the yearly/seasonal scale. There are several existing solutions already developed, based on different principles. But pushing these solutions further is raising other, new challenges: using more rare materials creates further environmental damage and generate politico-economic incidents. Some tech may be dangerous at large scale, or too costly, or have a too large footprint.

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