Four For Friday | June 16, 2023
Four For Friday | June 16, 2023
LF57 | Maxwell Social - New York's new social hub, AI architecture, 11 Life Lessons and 'Innovation Infrastructuring'
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
The return of the local social club: Maxwell Social
Maxwell Social, just opened in New York, is trying to reinvent the old-fashioned social club that your Italian relatives were part of. The founding team writes an insightful newsletter, which bemoans the lack of community, commercialisation and commodification of exclusive member-only clubs such as Soho House, and accurately (IMO) portrays NFT-gated Web3 group such as Bored Ape Yacht Club as “brand identities not communities”.
AI optimising architecture
Zaha Hadid Analytics + Insights is using AI to design buildings based on how people actually use them (NY Times). The articles notes that “people are requesting more choice, more personalization and more mobility” - similar sentiments that could apply to senior living.
11 Life Lessons from Self Help books
It seems the $11bn self-improvement industry - books, courses and auditoriums full of fawning fans - can be boiled down to 11 simple rules (Mashable):
Start small.
Change mental maps.
Scary is good.
Instant judgement is bad.
Remember the end of your life.
Be playful.
Be useful to others
Perfectionism = procrastination
Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat.
Write it all down.
You can't get it all from reading.
New report: Shaping Innovation Futures
ShapingInnovationFutures.co Australia’s Griffiths University Center for Systems Innovation, together with the Menzies Foundation have just released results of some recent work about how to best address the daunting societal challenges over the next 30 years. It’ll be no surprise to readers of this missive that innovators need to adopt systems change approaches, and build new enabling infrastructure. The report states:
Beyond specific solutions, we are focused on the underpinning conditions that enable us to organise, create, and act systemically. We frame the design and development of these foundations as ‘innovation infrastructuring’. For funders, impact entrepreneurs and champions of system change, we believe this approach offers a powerful lever and demands greater attention.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen