Blake McMeekin
Hello! My name’s Blake. I work with Analytics, Systems Analysis, and Design.
Analytics represents the way we sense the world.
Data is “information in digital form.” It’s everything we see on a screen, every phone call, every video of our kids, and every satellite image of a distant galaxy. The amount of information today is inconceivable - as of 2022 “roughly 2500 petabytes” of new data is generated every day, and that number grows continuously. How do we relate to these incredible streams of information, and how can we use them to understand and improve the world?
I entered into Data Science and Analytics in 2022 and progressed to a Senior Analyst position at an analytics agency and BI provider, Source Medium. Some customers included Clif Bars, Olipop, Dr. Bronners, and over 100 other brands and agencies. This was an incredible learning experience to see a wide sample of how some of the fastest growing modern organizations operate, including their advertising strategies, KPIs, data sources, and expenses. I witnessed and helped build systems which constantly streamed data from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Shopify, Stripe, and dozens of other sources into an integrated source of truth.
I’m also continuously experimenting with AI and machine learning, as the rest of our lives and the future of our organizations will be significantly impacted by these developments. There are unprecedented opportunities in choosing where and how to adopt these methods - AI literacy is already a succeed-or-fail factor for many businesses, and this will likely increase in the coming decade.
You can read about some of my AI/ML projects, including technical details and code, by clicking these links:
Systems Analysis represents the way we understand the world.
Systems Analysis is a way to make complicated things simpler. Nature has a habit of reusing organizational strategies that work. By studying these organizational strategies it’s possible to carry insights across domains and solve problems with more coherence and less redundancy.
My introduction to Systems Theory happened when I was just 18 and a mentor, Hal Bennett, lent me his favorite books collected over his ~30 years of running R&D organizations. In those books I read about a more coherent way to understand social systems and nature. Systems Theory refers to a set of perspectives to view things as emergent, interconnected, nested, nonlinear, scale-dependent, modular, and isomorphic, and these methods are particularly useful in management and the mapping of organizational dynamics.
Here are some computer simulations I’ve made of these sorts of natural or organizational dynamics:
Criticality in Networks
Phase-changes, self-organization, & sensitivity to initial conditions
Feedback, Circular-Causality, and Graph Bundling
Edge-of-chaos & Criticality
Graph Bundling
Fitness Landscapes & Hill Climbing
Growing products by starting from simulations of organizational systems
Studying systems theory and dynamics of nature also led to the creation of this website and design company, Alterity, as these organizational dynamics can continuously create unique things using creative processes closer to what we find in nature.
A side-effect of this research has been a number of consulting conversations with business owners about their business systems, incentive structures, marketing strategy, and product direction. This has supported successful product lines, fundraising, business models, and companies. I love these consulting conversations, and I’m always open to new ones!
Here’s some of my writing related to systems analysis:
Design represents what we create and change in the world.
I’ve worked with prototyping, product design, and engineering for over a decade, starting immediately after high-school at an optics and electronics startup in California. I’ve worked extensively with Lasers, 3D printers, CNC machines, CAD software, and other design and fabrication tools. Much of my design work has come in the form of physical parts:
The products on this website:
And things like this projection-microscope made from old camera lenses (Which can be read about and downloaded here.)
What’s next?
I’d like to continue to build software and design things that continue to expresses these passions and make people’s lives better. For software I’m particularly interested in building systems using Large Language Models and Graph Neural Networks in applications such as education technology, Analytics and BI, machine-reading of whitepapers or patents, social network analysis in organizations, or just connecting existing companies to the latest advancements in AI. For hardware projects, I’m interested in exploring scientific or precision systems, developing procedural product lines for existing brands, or developing 3D printing hardware or software.
Thanks so much for reading - now let’s make something! To get in touch, just reach out through one of these channels:
“One thing that this project highlighted was how often human organizations get “lost in the sauce” of long games of “telephone” that cause us to forget the broader market dynamics or systemic reasons for why we are doing what we’re doing. Creating these clear chains of reasoning that fluidly and quickly flow through the developmental pipeline or “simulated departments” strikes me as something that AI systems might be significantly better at than humans”