The Technical Imagination

I have crossed a kind of threshold; last night, at a party, I told someone that I was "leaving IT." That's significant--working in IT or IS or MIS or whatever you want to call it has been part of my identity for half my life. But the past year has made it clear to me that those days are over. The market no longer supports what I want to do from a "align yourself with the available job offerings and plug yourself into that system" perspective. Interestingly, I'm beginning to see that maybe it never did.
So now I'm in the Systems Design and Innovation business. Perhaps I always have been.
I've been noodling with his ideas of developing an integrated curriculum called "The Technical Imagination." I think it's really what I called "The Shift" over 20 years ago; it amazes me that the relevance or my own (perhaps deluded) sense of its market-worthiness hasn't waned. I don't know of or see anybody incorporating all the notions I put together over 20 years ago and offering it in a way that fits the way people learn today. I see it as a great opportunity.
There are people operating on this same wavelength -- the people in the knowledge management sphere such as Dave Snowden are perhaps the closest to it. But they are driving a process-based approach, whereas I'm envisioning this as technology mediated inquiry. A process for agent design. And that's the definable outcome -- a mindset for agent design.