John Kellden

@johnkellden.bsky.social

1088 Followers 3678 Following

Cards for Insight: How to play Add your thoughts to and between the cards. Cultivate understanding as generative closure.

Birkenstock for Schumer
A mostly black image with a cropped image of Trump's face, with a text above the face: paint it black
Green Beanie with a V
Green Beanie with a V
A boat, having made its last journey, now up on the shore on a grassy slope in the shade of a tree, turned houseboat. Cards for Insight: Virtue “There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-lost-horizon-c28ec3aa71e5
Image: Snow Monkeys chilling in a hot spring. Cards for Insight: Play Card: Social Media as Play In a network, in social media, we play: we click like buttons and add emojis, not because we like something, but to signal things, to ourselves, to the other and to others. The rules for our signalling reflect who we are online. "Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship." — Gregory Bateson https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-lost-horizon-c28ec3aa71e5
Policemen lead away a Green Alien after he crashed into Santa's Sleigh.
Image: Drawing by Tom Gauld, Shelves It isn't hoarding if all the books are on shelves.
Museum Goers with their Dog After Project 2025 Image to the Youtube video: Paul Simon - "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War"
Image: A screenshot of a scene from the movie Solaris by Andrey Tarkovsky, based on a book by Stanislaw Lem. Cards for Insight: Reach beyond Grasp Card: Beyond We see the world, not as it is, but as we are, and then, we reach beyond ourselves, and meet the universe halfway. ... notice how cards are portals, with your taking thought how you activate and step through ... Card: Stepping Stones Cards as stepping stones for humans finding themselves between narratives, seeking story. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-between-narratives-6a7ab15c0e49
Cards for Insight Card: Story Imagine thought as a journey through an intricate landscape. Each card is a step, a tool for navigating this terrain, uncovering hidden paths, and connecting seemingly distant ideas. With each move, the landscape becomes clearer, and what was once a maze of confusion turns into a map of understanding. As you progress, you’re not alone—others join you, their perspectives enriching the journey, their insights combining with yours to form a powerful collective force. This is Cards for Insight: a toolset for navigating the mind’s landscape, turning thought into action, and crafting a shared story of discovery and innovation. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-between-narratives-6a7ab15c0e49
An image showing current bluesky user count.
Cards for Insight: Great Design Card: Design Synthesis Making sense of complex information by combining diverse ideas, data, and perspectives into coherent insights. With Cards for Insight, design synthesis plays a central role in transforming the various card combinations into meaningful outcomes. It involves: - Connecting disparate ideas: Users drawing connections between seemingly unrelated cards to uncover novel insights, solutions, or strategies. - Pattern recognition: The platform with its cards, patterns of play, affordances and designs, facilitating the identification of recurring themes or patterns in the card combinations, helping users make sense of complexity. - Generating narratives: Enabling participants to synthesize insights from multiple cards into a collaborative narratives, evolving with card-play experiences, paths through possibility spaces and card-based decision-making and learning. In Cards for Insights, design synthesis is crucial for leveraging the platform’s combinatorial richness. It helps users move from user to participant, from card-play to insight generation, and from information overwhelm to transforming card combinations into powerful conclusions. — How would we know? — Flow. Flow is how we know. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-flow-c9c47816dd31
Cards for Insight: Taking Thought Card: Movement of Thought Divergent play opens spaces for exploration, emergent play reveals patterns and connections and, convergent play crystallizes understanding and directs action. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-flourish-2fc4420c5248
Cards for Insight: Tapestry of Ideas Card: Networks of Meaning How do our individual contributions interweave into a larger tapestry of ideas? What new connections can we create to deepen the narrative? https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-between-narratives-6a7ab15c0e49
Cards for Insight: Shu Ha Ri of Opinion In a network, the best place to explore questions is in metalogue with other people. Card: Shu Ha Ri Leveling up our social media game, exploring questions and refining our opinion. Shu Ha Ri: When We Learn "It is known that, when we learn or train in something, we pass through the stages of shu, ha, and ri. These stages are explained as follows. In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms that our forbearers created. We remain faithful to the forms with no deviation. Next, in the stage of ha, once we have disciplined ourselves to acquire the forms and movements, we make innovations. In this process the forms may be broken and discarded. Finally, in ri, we completely depart from the forms, open the door to creative technique, and arrive in a place where we act in accordance with what our heart/mind desires, unhindered while not overstepping laws." — Aikido master Endō Seishirō Shu: Defending personal opinion Ha: Exploring shared questions Ri: Refining opinions, turning questions into lines of inquiry and paths of purposeful action Card: Personal Opinion Defending our opinions, our personal perspectives. Card: Gathering Cards act as anchors for framing shared inquiries. Card: Networks of Meaning How do our individual contributions interweave into a larger tapestry of ideas? What new connections can we create to deepen the narrative? Card: Metalogue Metalogue combines attention, situational awareness, shared intelligence and dialogue, enabling purposeful conversation. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-between-narratives-6a7ab15c0e49
Cards for Insight: Mindsets Card: Mindset Shift More than its material parts, technology is a mindset. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-mending-92ed586811ff
Cards for Insight: Seeking Story ... navigate complexity; navigate the new; join a room for understanding; gather around a complex dilemma, formulated as a generative center question ... Card: Stepping Stones Cards as stepping stones for humans finding themselves between narratives, seeking story. ... pick cards and journal your immediate thoughts ... Card; Understanding What if understanding is our ability to hold space  for the possibility of knowledge, as it emerges,  unfolds, directs and discloses its relevance  to unexplored aspects of things known? Patterns of Play Before, after and between the cards. ... associate your thoughts to and between the cards ... ... pick cards and journal your immediate thoughts ... ... take thought, make small moves along paths of purposeful action and cultivate understanding as generative closure ... ... capture small group genius insights and create knowledge artifacts and cardcasts ... Cards for Insight: How to play Add your thoughts to and between the cards. Use the cards to navigate complexity. Cultivate understanding as generative closure. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-between-narratives-6a7ab15c0e49
"Obey" from the movie: They Live
Cards for Insight: Knowledge Ecosystems ... navigate complexity; navigate the new; gather around a complex dilemma, formulated as a generative question ... Card: Equity Core elements that support value creation, scalability, and equity in a collaborative knowledge ecosystem. ... associate your thoughts to and between the cards; use cards to trace the gradient from raw data and fragmented information to understanding; start with a few cards and gradually build up to more nuanced insights by layering inquiries; look for patterns in the cards that signify knowledge flow ... Card: Information turned Knowledge What if knowledge is a gradient? Moving from scattered, fragmented information to deeper understanding? ... take thought; make small moves along paths of purposeful action; cultivate understanding as generative closure; capture small group genius insights and create knowledge artifacts and cardcasts ... Card-Play and Card-Play Conversation Heuristics for Intermediate Users 1. Boundary Thinking: Recognize that boundaries in knowledge are permeable. Instead of treating them as barriers, explore them as opportunities to expand your inquiry. Ask how insights in one domain might inform another. 2. Dynamic Knowledge Flow: Use card-play to trace gradients of knowledge, moving from raw data to contextual intelligence. flow = structure x process 3. Contextual Agency: Focus on how contextual intelligence can turn insights into proactive responses. 4. Generative Inquiry: Treat inquiry as a spiraling process, revisiting and refining previous ideas. 5. Evolving Formats: Be flexible with the formats of play. Adapt the gameboards, associations, and rules to fit the evolving nature of the inquiry. 6. Artifact Refinement: Revisit cards, sessions, and casts as living artifacts. Update them as new insights emerge, and use them as guides for further inquiry. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-flow-c9c47816dd31
State of Independence "It is the very nature of the sound, the game" — Donna Summer https://youtu.be/aYW2o4uf504?si=vsLbPG_zM7JI58dw ............ Cards for Insight: State of Interdependence In a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people. https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-flow-c9c47816dd31
Cards for Insight: Mindset . ... propriocept small thinks ... . Card: Four Years Four years of uninterrupted joy, bliss and happiness. . ... mend small things ... . https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-mending-92ed586811ff . ................ . John Kellden: Speculate on five different ways ordinary online humans, having a busy day, full of stress, with looming political and ecosystemic worries ahead, could still read, reflect on and find inspiration in the below card. . Card: Four Years Four years of uninterrupted joy, bliss and happiness. . ChatGPT: Here are five speculative ways in which a busy, stressed person could interact with the message on the card *"Four years of uninterrupted joy, bliss, and happiness"* and find inspiration despite their worries: . 3. A Reminder of Resilience For someone overwhelmed by stress, the card might symbolize the belief that better days lie ahead. Even in the face of political or ecological uncertainty, it could inspire a sense of resilience, nudging the reader to focus on what they can do today to create pockets of bliss and to hold onto hope for a brighter future. . 5. An Invitation to Simplify The phrase might suggest to a reader that joy, bliss, and happiness aren’t inherently complicated. The card could inspire them to let go of unnecessary stresses—perhaps by decluttering their schedule, saying no to obligations that don’t serve them, or focusing on the simpler pleasures in life, like a good book, a quiet moment, or an act of kindness. . By engaging with the message in these ways, the card becomes not just a whimsical idea but a source of reflection and actionable inspiration for someone navigating the challenges of a busy, stress-filled life. . https://johnkellden.medium.com/cards-for-insight-flourish-2fc4420c5248
Cards for Insight ... navigate complexity; navigate the new; gather around a complex dilemma, formulated as a generative center question ... Card: Conscious Evolution A purposeful shift in individual and collective awareness leading to intentional and responsible co-creation of the future. ... take thought, make small moves along paths of purposeful action and cultivate understanding as generative closure ... Card: Preferable Outcome A vision of a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future, where individuals and communities flourish in harmony with each other and the natural world. ... capture small group genius insights and create knowledge artifacts and cardcasts ... “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” — Thomas Merton
Cards for Insight: Ecologies of Care ... adopt a civil code of behavior ... Card: Civil Code Adopting a civil code of behavior. ... add thoughts, connect cards and questions ... Card: Civil Code - Synergy What if adopting a civil code means co-creating an online and offline ecology of care, where actions amplify collective well-being, and every contribution is a step toward a brighter shared horizon? ... take thought, make small moves along paths of purposeful action and cultivate understanding as generative closure, capture small group genius insights and create knowledge artifacts and cardcasts ...
Cards for Insight: Myth Card: Myth Myth connects us to the deep, timeless narratives that shape our understanding of existence and our place in the cosmos. There's profound value and scalable products and services that remain almost untapped, in the (venn) intersects and overlaps between the below cards. ... gather around a complex dilemma, formulated as a generative center question, placed at the center of a Cards for Insight 3x3 gameboard ...
Cards for Insight: Seeing Ourselves Through Card: Scylla and Charybdis Those who navigate too close find themselves ensnared in endless debates, weighed down by the inertia that comes from too much caution and compromise. Opposite Scylla, the Republican Party swirls as Charybdis—a whirlpool with an appetite for radical change, a lack of caution, and the absence of meaningful guardrails. While the Democrats are listless, the Republicans 
are turbulent, spinning in the spiral of a narrative in defiance of facts, tolerance, and norms. Charybdis, with its powerful currents, devours all stability around it, drawing citizens into a torrent where ideological fervor trumps deliberation. With little restraint, the Republican Party has increasingly drifted from its traditional boundaries, eroding norms and checks that once offered its members guidance and purpose. It has become a force that disrupts rather than builds. Anyone drawn too close risks being caught in undercurrents of moral turpitude, where dissent is dismissed and where both competence and collective responsibility is sacrificed for mindless loyalty and thinly disguised greed.
Card: Understanding What if understanding is our ability to hold space for the possibility of knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds, directs and discloses its relevance to unexplored aspects of things known?