Explorable Explanations Nicky's Next Explorable: Survey Results! For the past few years, I made games that teach ideas – but, I wondered, can I make games that teach skills? Apparently, I don't have the skill of making my
Explorable Explanations Explorable Explanations: 4 More Design Patterns Four years ago (wow, already four?), we had the first-ever Explorable Explanations meetup, to talk about teaching through play. We had no idea what we were doing. Still don't. But,
New Project! New Mini-Explorable! “Attractors” This one's a really short one. Five minutes to play/read: An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes 🗻🎱🗻 I actually made this a few months ago, but put it aside to
New Project! New Explorable! "The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds" Why do groups of people act smart, dumb, kind, cruel? My new explorable explanation on networks & crowd psychology is out now: 😐The WISDOM and/or MADNESS of CROWDS 😐 Hope
ART How Do We Learn? A Zine Links to References: Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the difference? by Edith Ackermann (PDF) Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (book) The Spacing
How To Become A Centaur The following is the first third of an article I wrote for MIT's Journal of Design & Science. You can read the full version here! Garry cringed, like someone just
Nicky Reads The Most Meaningful Books I Read in 2017 Yes, this blog post is way past due. A new New Year's Resolution: actually blog on schedule, sheesh. Last year, I read 40 books – 25 non-fiction, 15 fiction! Of all
Short Stories The War on Yourself World War III (WWIII), also known as The War On Yourself, was a global war that lasted from 2022 to 2025.[1][2] It was the deadliest conflict in human
Short Stories Take Your Time “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” ~ Parkinson's Law I hate dystopian stories. And yes, I've read them. All of them. Why not? I have
Nicky Reads The Happiness Trap: Zine-ified A while back, I read Russ Harris's The Happiness Trap, an introduction to Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. It's really helped me out the last couple months, so I thought I'd
How To How I Make Explorable Explanations You want to share a powerful idea – an idea that could really enrich the lives of whoever you gift it to! But communication is hard. So how do you share
Talks My Long Now Talk: "Seeing Whole Systems" Watch it here! The talk is 1 hour long, followed by 20 minute of Q&A. Also there's a short film about robots dying in horrible ways
New Project! "The Evolution of Trust" is out! The Evolution of Trust an interactive guide to the game theory of trust! based off robert axelrod's groundbreaking 1984 book, The Evolution of Cooperation. i'm actually writing this post in september, but i'm making it look like it's showing up in july. i'm doing
Emergence: GIF-splained ...other than that, though, nobody agrees on a workable definition of "emergence", let alone a theory of emergence. But at least I can explain this much with a small GIF. (Last week, I experimented with explaining stuff through a blog-comic. This week,
Jigsaw Puzzles As a tweet: twitter.com/ncasenmare/status/857589095069077504 For more stuff about knowledge being actively constructed, watch Derek Muller's (Veritasium) TED Talk on why you need to confuse people to
Explorable Explanations ENVIRONMENT ⇆ ECONOMY A lot of people – on all ends of the political spectrum – believe it's the environment versus the economy. Climate versus capitalism. Mother Nature versus markets. I've run out of alliterations,
Behind The Scenes LOOPY: A Post-Mortem Loops changed my life. Three years ago, I picked up a copy of Donella Meadows' Thinking In Systems. The core idea of her book is this: we humans tend to
Social Change Independence ⇄ Interdependence When I was younger, I prided myself on being independent, not needing others' help. That's why, when I sliced my thumb open in a Safeway, I just wrapped it in
Nicky Reads The Most Meaningful Books I Read in 2016 In 2016, I learnt a lot about myself and the world. Mostly, I learnt about how much I've yet to learn. True learning comes from experience and relationships and deep
This Time It's Personal A Constellation of Guiding Stars As my mama always said, every pipe bomb has a silver lining. 2016 hasn't been the most uplifting of years, world-events-wise. This summer we saw two lone-wolf terrorist attacks, shootings
This Time It's Personal We Become What We Behold, a Post-Mortem I'm still reeling from 2016, and it's not even done yet. As someone who makes & consumes “media” – so I guess that's every one of us now – I'm mad at
This Time It's Personal reflecting on :the game: Holy nostalgia, Batman! I found the original concept "art" for a videogame I made eight years ago. (And on my birthday, too! It's my birthday today! It's a
ART The Other Side .content img { width: 480px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0; border: none; } Originally posted as four pics in a tweet. Links to the authors' books: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt A
Social Change Evolution, Not Revolution The next time you're tempted to praise an idea, a movement, or yet another photo-sharing app as "revolutionary"... remember how actual revolutions usually turn out. Like everyone else,
Nicky Reads Three Books on Violence Forty-nine people at a queer nightclub, then a Member of Parliament in Britain, then 300+ Muslims during Ramadan, then two black men, then five police officers, then 84 beachgoers, then
