Graduation Weekend! (Go Lakers!)

Today is graduation day for all of our graduate and adult students in the Intel Studies program at Mercyhurst. Tomorrow, all our seniors will graduate as well. SAM wishes them all the best with high honors going to the parents, family and friends who supported them all the way through what is a pretty tough program. This song is for all of you:

Final Thoughts: A Challenge To Designers (Serious Play)

I knew it would take me a few days to both recover from jet-lag and to synthesize all the ideas that both came to me (and were thrust upon me) at the Serious Play Conference last week. It was a fascinating examination of seriousness, play and design (in all its forms) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in seeing what the world looks like (or might look like) outside their usual box.

As much as I enjoyed being in the midst of the intellectual fireworks, I couldn't help but think that the kind of design solutions the intelligence community needs were not in the mix. Most of the designs I saw actively drew attention to the product, they helped sell it in some way or helped the product or film or project make its point from a particular point of view. I suppose the designers would tell me that such a reaction is inevitable, that good design draws one in and bad design repulses and that there is no neutral ground.

Still, intelligence products, in my estimation, need something different than what I saw. I was reminded (really!) of Lao Tse's comment on good leadership: The best kind of leader is one who, when the job is done, the people say, "We did it ourselves!" Likewise, the best kind of design for intelligence products is, in my estimation, the kind of design that, when the product is viewed by a decisionmaker, the decisionmaker does not notice that it is there yet it helps analysts communicate their findings.

Form matters. Anyone who has tried to decipher a single spaced block of 8 point text knows that some elements of design are essential no matter what the product. At the other end of the spectrum, form doesn't trump content. While this is probably true of all things, it is certainly true in intelligence work.

Herein, then, lies the challenge to designers: How should the intelligence profession design its products? What kinds of design solutions best meet the needs of the modern intelligence professional? How would intelligence change if the kind of creative firepower I saw at the conference were brought to bear upon it? Would we be able to communicate the results of our analysis better or would it just be "different"? I don't know the answer to these questions but I think it would fascinating to find out.

(Note: This was a different kind of conference for me and I suspect for most of the regular readers of this blog. If you are interested in my other observations (and have not seen them already), I have listed them below in chronological order)

Related Posts:
Liveblogging The Serious Play Conference
Cosmology, Psychology And The Mathematics Of Crease Patterns ... And That Was Just Day One
Jump Ropes And Magic
Surreal Saturday: Brilliant Crows
Sunday Funnies: John Oliver

Mercyhurst Intel Studies Student Wins Ransome Scholarship (Hooo-ah!)

In case you missed the press release, Bobby Williams, an intel studies student at Mercyhurst, just won the Ransome Scholarship and will be shipping off to St. Andrews next year to earn a masters in Middle Eastern Security Studies. Bobby is one of those students who has taken full advantage of everything the college has to offer. He has served as an intelligence analysis intern with the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond, Va., and as a counterterrorism analyst intern with the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. Currently, he is working as a strategic market analyst for General Electric Transportation Systems in Erie. He has a 3.96 GPA, was a resident assistant and a captain of the Mercyhurst club hockey team. I have known Bobby for his entire stay here and he is fantastic student, dedicated analyst and genuinely good person. Congratulations to Bobby, his parents and family -- well done!

India Moving To Counter China's Growing Influence In Sri Lanka (ISN)

Kirk Shoemaker, a student here at Mercyhurst, recently had an article published in ISN's Intel Briefs series regarding India's recent moves with regard to Sri Lanka. Kirk thinks that India's actions are primarily designed to counter what he thinks India likely perceives as growing Chinese influence over the island nation. Kirk goes on to say that India "is reconfiguring its military policy toward Sri Lanka and is exhibiting a more supportive stance toward the government's efforts against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)." Kirk's evidence and writing are pretty compelling. The full article is available on the ISN's website.

Sunday Funnies: John Oliver (Serious Play .. Sort of)

I was not able to stay for the last session of the Serious Play Conference. I had a flight to catch and, as a result, I missed John Oliver's speech. Many people are familiar with Oliver's work on The Daily Show but I am more impressed with some of his earlier radio work with the BBC. For a sample listen to this episode of The Department (a top secret think tank within her Majesty's government designed to solve Britain's most intractable problems in less than 24 hours) on terrorism. If you like British humor (or humour, as it were...) you will like this. (Note: The Department is overtly political and the language can be a bit rude).