Imagination: The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images, or external objects not present to the senses.
Potential: the inherent capacity for coming into being

Background:
“What we think and do changes the patterns of connections within the neural networks of the brain, and this can alter the brain’s structure and function.”

“They suggest that the brain remains ‘plastic’ throughout our lives, and could be ‘sculpted’ by how we use it. It may be possible to exploit this neuroplasticity to create novel, noninvasive and non-pharmaceutical therapies for some neurological conditions.”
Prof. Tim Crow / Clues to the origin of language / Research Intelligence

Source:
Knowledge Technologies and the Asymmetric Threat
Paul S. Prueitt, PhD
Research Professor
Cyber Security Policy & Research Center
George Washington University

IMAGINATION POTENTIAL (IP) – THE HUMAN RESOURCE

Error in the face of dilemma has been attributed to failures of imagination and failures of vision.

We see Imagination potential as the totality of what can be thought. Of what images, original or existing that can be formed in the mind. IP might also be considered as the rate at which the imagination can intuit and synthesize disparate variables into meaningful wholes.

-How do we help ourselves more deeply explore this potential?
-What is the value associated with it? (Relative to the individual & organization)

Imagination potential represents a critical frontier of our age that can and should be explored, developed, exercised more intensely. As an asymmetric element of intelligence, imagination is an endless resource of envisioning potential; its flexibility continually produces content disproportionate and disruptive to the existing and the known. While many human skills and capacities can be automated the processes of human imagination, to the extent of our current knowledge, cannot. Our imaginative processes symbolize one of the key differentiators of our species; it is the human resource, a truly sapien cognitive function; setting us apart from the rest of nature and technology.

-How does imagination affect competitive advantage within the knowledge economy?

It is likely that a comprehensive non-pharmaceutical approach to achieving a neuro-competitive advantage required to face existing and emerging dilemmas will be taken. How do we cultivate an increased capability to imagine? What is missing is an integration of the best of natural science and computer science (Prueitt) to develop the analytical technologies and processes, equally qualitive and quantitive, required to arrive at a measure resembling something of an Imagination Quotient.

It may be that organizations internally engage to demonstrate imaginative capabilities and barriers, for the purpose of deploying imagination diagnoses to gain a high resolution of the entirety of an organization’s imaginative “assets.” These imaginative assets can be described as the sum of depth, variety and expression of imaginative types contained within. A corresponding set of literacy and experience expansion exercises, incubators and accelerators can be created and deployed to improve and nurture the development of existing and unknown forms of imagination. These protocols may be a potential future foundation for hiring processes, business education, and evaluation of competition as well as alliances.

Expanding our imaginative potential to address issues outside of existential threat and competitive gain has the potential sub-effect of forming advantageous positions beyond competition. Which may serve to conceive of, and define latent roles and markets currently not present to the senses.

-Is human imagination potential the primary frontier of the knowledge age?
-How does imagination affect competitive advantage within the knowledge economy?
-Could an asymmetric lifestyle and literacy contribute to the development of a more complete full spectrum imagination?
-What role does literacy play in the development of the imagination?

RELATED TOPICS TO BE EXPLORED

Types of Imagination
“The Full Spectrum Imagination”
Education, Literacies and Building Imagination
Imagination Metrics
Market and Competitor Diagnosis
Collaboration and Alliance

“They have moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you have to work out life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. you don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the heroes deed.”
Source:
Joseph Campbell – The Power of Myth

Does experience enhance and reflect ones ability to imagine, and vice versa?

ORIGINAL EXPERIENCE: A LIFESTYLE

Joseph Campbell likens this form of experience to the metaphors of journeying into the dark forest, or into the world of fire. These poetic framings describe entering situations with no formerly constructed insight, order or infrastructure. It is a frontier with no prior contact or exposure. By accessing new vantages from which a greater amount to uncharted dynamics can be seen; choices and opportunities can be identified, analyzed and transformed into beneficial and valuable outcomes.

The symmetric lifestyle we describe as the pre-lived life; furnished with common knowledge, expectations and a degree of predictability it is the commons of interpreted experience. Alternative motivations, desire and uncommon goal setting born from an original experience signify steps toward engaging in an asymmetric lifestyle. Which in turn establishes greater chances to participate in original experiences.

Original Experience is a transformative mechanism in that it requires one to cognize situations, forces and elements without names, history, associated beliefs and definitions. These experiential trials practice the minds ability change its neural structures that reflect a process of arriving at an understanding of a new vantage or variable. This forces one to exercise and sharpen their instinctive discernment, intuitive faculties, open-mindedness, and decision-making abilities. Delivering whole new ”bodies of possibility” to others is what we see to be the value of original experience.

The pursuit of original experience in the knowledge age may give rise to a new succession of human dream and desire revealed by the conditions and requirements that are unique to our current mixed epochal conditions.

RELATED TOPICS TO BE EXPLORED

Transformation and Awareness
-Supplementing and Intensifying the Imagination
-Knowledge, Tools and Literacies
-Motivation and Desire
-Experience and Neuroplasticity
-Metaphor and Lateral Thinking
-Communication and Extension of Benefit

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Awareness:
means “to be cognizant, conscious, awake, alert, watchful, and vigilant,” adjectives that mean mindful or heedful of something. Aware implies knowledge gained through one’s perceptions, the attitudes of others. Ignorance and obliviousness are the opposites of awareness.

Pre·sup·pose: vt
1.To believe that a particular thing is true before there is any proof of it
2.To make something necessary if a particular thing is to be shown to be true or false.

“When institutions experience a history, false consciencness in the form of reification may emerge. Reification occurs when the individual does not see her authorship of the world, but see and objective “thing”, unmalleable and impermeable. – Thus as social constructions go through repetition and habitualization, the social world takes on the appearance of non-human facticity. Reification occurs, then, as the individual forgets that the world is a human production.”
Source:
Frank J. Barrett and Suresh Srivasiva
History as a Mode of Inquiry in Organizational Life: A Role for Human Cosmogony

ASYMMETRIC SELF-AWARENESS

Lifestyles enable experience, acquainting individuals and organizations with emerging literacies.

To be asymmetrically aware means to hold and practice an understanding that life and its many experiences aren’t solely defined or confined by assumptions, beliefs and constructions that are widely held as truth. Both the enemy and origin of the defined, is ones power of definition, itself rooted in curiosity, imagination and also ones need for order. It is to recognize a better choice amongst scarcity and realizing ones ability to act upon it. Another important aspect of self awareness is taking stock of ones multiple identities and thinking processes that accompany them,

Shifts in our attention, driven by emergent desires triggers symmetry-breaking awakenings, continually transforming what one can be and is aware of. Asymmetrical awareness is discovered through satisfying a curiosity to test apparent boundaries and their presupposed limitations while learning more about the contexts and conditions within which they operate. How do our current educational models and business cultures encourage and feed this curiosity?

Development tools are used for risk management, quality assurance and process improvement. Which serve a good purpose, but alone should not guide human development and exploration.

- MAN VS. MACHINE DEBATE – IMAGINATION VS. AUTOMATION
- Anticipating that technology will make obsolete those literacy behaviors that educational psychologists identify as concrete/sequential, Putrajaya’s education of the young will favor those with abstract/random abilities; as one architect sketched, “smart schools will allow teachers to concentrate on the right-hand side of the brain, the creative side. Educating the left-hand side of the brain can be automated” (Jacques, 1997). – Source: Changing Literacies: History, Technology, and the Global Village- by Thomas E. Gage”

- RIGHT LEFT BRAIN SYNTHESIS
- One goal of asymmetric literacy is to encourage a greater intentional cooperation and synthesis between the right and left-brain thinking. We believe that the mind and its imagination can become more potent and sustainable by encouraging both symmetrical and asymmetrical lifestyles and learning. Filling out more faculties and functions and Getting more forms of intelligence to work together increases creative horse power. The “Four-star Generalist” equipped with a full spectrum imagination is a critical force multiplier worth having on any team, in any circumstance.

- NETWORTH OF IDENTITIES: Developing the multiple-personality-is-order.
In George Simmel’s Web of Group Affiliations, he suggests that, while social groups are composed of individuals, it is through those group affiliations that we are defined as
individuals. Without seeing something in different contexts, it is difficult to define it as it own entity. Otherwise we make the error of seeing it only as a part of something else. Simmel suggests that we become more and more defined by each new group that we join or are affiliated with. Our individuality is
born at the at the center of the different influences that affect us.

- Web of Group Affiliations also suggests we have developed a diverse network of internal identities. The generative metaphors for individuals and organizations are Flexibility, permeability, protean, saturation, multiplictious. (Turkle, Martin, Reingold, Liften) We suggest that beyond adaptive potential, this awareness of self enriches and enhances ones potential to imagine through the multivocal and interdialogical traits of ones identity. Maximizing these qualities is not only then a question of increased communication. But also the conscious cultivation of metaphor for its potential to initiate a new quality of conversation between our identities and there subsequent literacies, due to its ability to enhance awareness of relatedness, and retrieval of understanding (McLuhan). Interpersonal dialogues create perspectival relativity and inquiry required for the co-exploration and co-creation of a new generation of perspectives and tools that are equipped to develop alternative forms of interpretation and creation.
- Is the net worth of identities their potential fuse an imaginative big bang enabled by the agile translation and migration of understanding between roles?

To meet the competitive challenges and creative dilemmas of the future a parallel capability of passionate imaginative pursuit needs to be developed to gain unconventional vantages of possibility. One tool for acquiring new forms of knowledge and understanding is immersion and engagement in original experiences.

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ON MOTIVATION (SPACE)

Motivations can be conflicting and asymmetric. They are often unobvious, personal and internalized; they can however be observed in their externalized (manifest) states as behaviors/actions- or lack thereof.

Motivations are rooted in desire. They drive our willingness, or unwillingness to seek transformation through action. The asymmetrically literate is, to some degree, reliant upon symmetrical and rather predictable systems of motivations to provide the right conditions for pre-competitive asymmetric thought. How then do we develop the ability to “read” and “write” asymmetric motivations- by understanding the conditions that surround them? Furthermore, understanding their characteristics and definitive limitations as being either self-imposed (chosen-controlled) or as external pressures applied by circumstance (Not chosen – not controlled) is an important aspect to asymmetric empowerment. As a pre-competitive capacity, the asymmetrically literate would learn to identify- move towards –map- and exploit safe and perhaps yet unknown- undesirable- uninhabited places – that promise to shield them (Christiansen HBS) from competitive pressures applied from the outside in. Christiansen explores this metaphor further by suggesting that it is within these shielded places that asymmetric skills or “swords” can be discovered and developed.

Is it possible that asymmetric literate could, over time, develop a better sense for both internal and external motivational pressures and their influences on imagination potential and transformative capacities? How does the asymmetrically literate individual or organization understand motivations as creating safe and desirable places within systems contexts? It may be the time spent getting and staying there- location relative to and motivations touching on a higher goal or desire -being the deciding factors.

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The ability of humans to plan and shape the world for their future needs is what separates man from animals. The oppressed majority must be taught to imagine a better way so that they can shape their future and thereby become more human.

“The symmetric” (my addition and emphasis) – person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.
Source:
Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

BY ANY AND ALL MEANS NECESSARY (IDEOLOGY & STATE OF MIND)

Any and all means necessary can be seen as a base ideology – a state of mind- and guiding principle rooted in the expansion of choice. As applied to asymmetric literacy it defines flexible states of accessibility- maneuverability- uncertainty and relativity. It is purely asymmetric and pre-competitive in nature- as it suggests a willingness to imagine, accept and act upon a scope of options that go beyond the consequential/circumstantial limitations of the other. It remains formless, complex and confusing. It allows one to read and write value differently.

We interpret Sartre and Malcolm X’s original proclamation as being meant to free the senses and intuition from the shackles of codified limitations. In this context, as applied to literacy it is meant to help one read the invisible inventories that remain hidden to the symmetrical eyes-ears and minds of the conventionalist; it is meant to open up the world and make everything a potentially exploitable resource. This is not necessarily a question of morality or ethics but more a question of awareness and imagination potential. It is a means of combating perceived, apparent or imposed barriers, and scarcities of means and resource.

This might require a more critically unique approach to observing system characteristics and identifying the safe or “shielding” qualities (Christiansen) where one might develop new/alternative skills and capacities in the pursuit of actualization and achievement.

Notes to the next cup.

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People tinker, they build, remix, they repurpose, reverse and perverse engineer.  They crack open the housing. Look under the hood. They view the source. We have always made things, and have been defined by what we make and how it was made. Today the ‘refresh rate’ of the majority of physical objects is in line with the just-in-time business processes responsible for the economic dance that synchronizes and coordinates time, resources, design, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. Emerging manufacturing technologies suggest that much of what we will produce materially in the future will be printed by mix of industrial and domestic multi-material fabricators and recyclers. Widespread adoption of these processes shortens lead times, speeding up manufacturing processes and thus the “flow of objects”. Begging a new question around why should something come to be? Is hyper-disposability and reproduction of the same matter a sustainable idea?   How might “just in time objects”, or a service-like time-share in a “pattern of matter” change expectations and experiences?

Just as the web moved from static websites to “feeds and flows” objects too are moving from static things to service driven production by newly minted ‘manufacturing- as-service’ practices. We may begin to see ‘things’ as instantiations of responsive and relational system of services, feeds and flows. As objects become considered information, they become more and more malleable, subject to change, edits, mixes and blends. Simultaneously giving birth to a new breed of unconventional value propositions and business opportunities. Could what Google did for information, be done with matter? Today’s adaptive and flexible digital manufacturing technologies and production processes lend themselves to the kind of ‘experience data’ varieties, and flow of designs stemming from an interplay of experience sampling infrastructure, user-annotation and user-guided design. Objects can become passports to experience and feedback, a platform for citizen consultants to sketch dream products and interactions. Foraging a direct interface between people and organizations.

Object behavior, perception and communication explorations are strange attractors of interest to business, policy and academia. As consumers we ‘vote’ with our wallets, clicks, time and attention. People expect things to be easy to use, cost little or nothing, maximize personal freedom, be customizable, safe and secure, and to learn about our personal preferences. [Lee et al] According to the literature describing the promise of Ubiquitous Computing artifacts, people expect value from seamless anybody, any service, any place, any time and any device interactions. [Weiser]  It seems as though people expect things to just get better, and to be a breeze, to be almost invisible. Organizations need sustainable returns on their IP holdings, mobilizing them through product, service and systems solutions in the marketplace. How do we create a common vocabulary for mass innovation interactions needed to move toward a system that satisfies all of these concerns?

Products and services are behavior ‘enabling and mapping’ technologies, the identification and recording of behaviors on an object level will be critical to mass innovation. Products and spaces too can be a platform for enabling the recording of user annotations and innovations. Labs will spill out in into the streets, into objects, and into your hands, boasting a growing evolving upgradeable ‘experiential literacy.’ Revealing new insights into the climate of intent, motivation, and experience that contribute to the meanings an object may be associated with. A future Google result for “Sketching User Experiences” may return – “Did you mean: Users sketching experiences?”

Can objects become collectively or individually authored by their users? The relationships between object and the individual/group experience produce a stream of information in regard to the conceptual, emotional and functional role of the object.  Through time the information may show shifts and transitions of a given objects roles in relation to changes in what it means to people. This information is an invaluable and currently under observed resource that can aid in the design of the next instantiation of a given object. Designing in, through and from the human processes that negotiates meaning through experience is key to sustained relevance. Better inspiring and facilitating the habits that accompany new meanings around objects as they manifest. A great deal of strategic value for organizations, institutions and individuals lies in cracking this dilemma, and in creating the things and interfaces that operate not just for many people, but also because of them. An infrastructure that is an interface to infrastructure. New revenue strategies and more important, pervasive co-prosperity lie dormant in the interplay of the social negotiation of ‘what could be’ and ‘what comes to be.’

‘Non-destructive Annotation’, historically used in design and architecture where one would employ vellum in drafting to make suggestions, is beginning to migrate to digital media through startups such as Cozimo, that offer the sharing, discussion and annotation of digital files. Vellum was traditionally the tangible ‘comment medium’ beyond text. One could draw alternatives, suggest changes, write words, measures and dimensions ect. Cozimo offers a direct write onto digital video and image files, as a workflow friendly way to converse around digital works, as conversations become more remote and asynchronous. One side effect we are beginning to see as hard things gain increasingly soft qualities; the surface and motion of things are beginning to become interface. I can navigate a game or control my Roomba vacuum cleaner with the accelerometer within my laptop. I can translate complex real world actions into in-game behavior with a Wiimote. The iPhone’s ‘screen sprawl’ has almost engulfed the entirety of the device, and Apple’s patents suggest that it eventually will. Ambient Devices boasts objects that are screen, streaming real world data by way of color saturation and gradient change. Objects indeed are becoming screen, and screen is becoming interactive interface. If we push this to the limit of  “objects as interface’ they become a ripe vessel for explicit tangible annotation, where people can voice what they might like to see and feel stemming from their interpretations and personal experiences. People sketching, scrubbing and manipulating, and speaking through tweaking in the context of use, produces a wealth of variants that add up to thousands or millions of nuanced ‘perfect’ products, a ‘mass innovation.’

The majority of people might allow objects to accrue metadata, cultivating its ‘aboutness’, as opposed to annotation. The use of products can become a direct interface to manufacturing processes, as objects implicitly harvest suggestions through their journeys in human habiture. What we may see is the collision of user driven ambient and explicit annotations and designs, with the emerging fabrication processes that are engulfing the production of everyday things. Normal things. A product line of enabled objects can become a networked innovation lab that innovates from within the experience and interactions of a population of prosuming-performers. There is opportunity in harnessing the narrative of edge competencies diverse and driven individuals are expressing. The convergence of hardware as software, new forms of experience sampling, user annotation and design, manufacturing as service, combined with the behavior of remix cultures create ripe conditions for new classes of user-generated content built around read/write matter.

Ambient Co-creation

BCN FORMULA GAME
“BCN formula is a planning tool in the form of an operational multi-player game, that generates building proposals for Barcelona in real-time. The existing city is modelled as a two-plus-eleven-dimensional grid that processes its internal states like a cellular automat, and can be externally influenced by the users through urban interventions. These interventions change the position of blocks within the eleven urban dimensions of Barcelona defined by ESARQ students. The dimensions are capturing the swarming life, traffic, and commercial activities enfolding in the existing Barcelona grid. The grid influences the movement of a swarming point cloud. As soon the point cloud reaches critical mass, it generates a sculptural structure informed by the multi-dimensional procedural model of the city. ESARQ students provided feedback to the process by interpreting the structures as buildings in urban contexts, which are placed by the point cloud at locations that fit the criteria. Parallel to the existing grid, a seducing city comes to flourish, respecting the old rationalist city grid but refraining from any mimicry. The new parallel city of Barcelona co-exists with the existing one.

Here, city planning is not thought of as a top-down pressure but as a strategy for evolving existing social structures. The workshop participants described the genetic codes of the Barcelona Grid and the Barcelona feeling and atmosphere.  The students were asked to design flowcharts diagramming the city as an input > processing > output device. The students learned how to work with the game development programme Virtools, which was then used to build the multi-player planning game. Playing the planning game produces the data [in realtime], which are used for the design of the buildings from the parallel world. Procedures include intuitive acts.

The resulting structures are blobs, in that they are double-curved, twisted, seemingly irrational and not geometrically derivable structures. Yet such blobs they are only to those who do not know the genetic code and the procedures that generated these highly informed, context-related building structures.”

The example above describes a new anomalous form of co-creation, where interacting individuals and existing infrastructure becomes a stream of entangled and dialogical real-time data and information. This data constitutes a shared vocabulary for further discussion, a shared design material that can be observed, shaped, and expressed in a myriad of ways. In this example the Hyperbody Research group from Deflt TU in the Netherlands are enabling a system whereby users indirectly partake in generative architecture and city planning. The team of researchers may audit, tweak and further develop these plans for viable implementation. The BCN Formula game, through the mediums of location, transaction  and visualization have fashioned a low cognitive sub-activity that generates useful pre-design material for professionals to ingest and design from. BCN is a weak signal that provides an existence proof that we can model, to some degree, products, spaces and experiences as a side effect of living.

Any product in the hands of a person, or any place proximal to people is valuable time that could provide useful information about how products and spaces are used, their unforeseen uses, as well as how they interact with other objects and spaces. Information such as this reveals unknown but existing value, that can be amplified to create more moving, useful and compelling experiences. This is a new evolutionary step from the Focus group or the Supergroup, it is unfocused, indirect creation through the ambient ‘sketchings and suggestions’ of people living life. “Everybody” may not be a designer, but indeed, “Everybody” can partake in “living co-authorship.”

Direct Annotation, Definition and Design
For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators. This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part.

“We-think” Charles Leadbeater

There is the other side to this argument. People who want to do. People have always modded, hacked and ‘did it themselves’ and we still do. Communities such as make.com, instructibles.com and various DIY cultures in backyards and basements still preserve this resourceful skill. It spans everything from the biotech hobbyist to children who have to make their own toys. Some do it for sport, and some out of necessity.

‘Direct Creation’ is the idea that near future objects will be a medium of digital/tangible sketching, annotation and expression enabling people to customize, re-design, re-specify, re-render and re-print objects. Objects with this capability will enable a flexibility, hackability, and freedom with digital precision that former generations of objects just could not match. The difference between Direct Annotation/Creation and Ambient Co-creation is that Direct Creation is a individual or social act that takes time, attentional and cognitive resources of the user/creator. Time and attention are scarce, so the benifets and rewards of their participation would have to outweigh their investments.

Palcom, a recent European Union funded research project explored the antithesis of Latour’s “black box.” This touches on the difference of knowing how something works and knowing how to work it. Palcom, short for palpable computing supports the autonomy, authorship and access implied by Direct Creation in their statement:

“..notions like inspection, experimentation, translation, and emergent use become important, as people creatively connect and use ‘assemblies’ of palpable pervasive technologies.”

They continue to explain “palpability”:

By ‘palpable’ we mean ‘noticeable’ and ‘understandable’. Palpability is not a property of technology itself, but an effect of people’s engagement with technologies, objects, and environments. For designers of pervasive computing, this means that they cannot design palpability into technologies. But they can design for palpability, to support people in making computing palpable.

I love to look at toys sometimes as indicators of future features. One of these toys that offers rather unorthodox features of palpability and direct creation is Topobo:

Topobo is a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo’s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons with Topobo, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly. The same way people can learn about static structures playing with building blocks, they can learn about dynamic structures playing with Topobo.

Simply Topobo is like Lego with gesture memory that you can ‘program through play.’ It is this form of playful programming that could enable many people to engage in design conversations through the object, the very subject of the conversation. As screen and shape deforming materials begin to merge with object skins and surfaces, form and function becomes no longer solely determined by material constraints, form becomes programmable, as does function and service. Form in this case no longer follows function, form follows sponentaity, improvisation, will and desire. Form follows Relationships.

Chances are ‘Thought to Thing’ interfaces will not occur so seamlessly. It will emerge in messy stages and spurts, with many faces. Recently on a trip to Amsterdam I walked into a Puma flagship store to find a novel way of buying a shoe.  What appeared to be a cafeteria cashier’s station with small containers filled with shoe parts, was actually a small factory. The ‘factory’ combined physical pieces of shoes with RFID tags to be scanned, and a digital touch screen where one could modify the scanned pieces and build a new shoe. It could be paid for immediately and delivered to your door in a couple of weeks. This is a rather crude form of direct creation. Long waits. You have to do it in the store; cool, but no go. Stephen Intille describes ‘User based Digital Designs’ in his research paper entitled ‘Eliciting User Preferences Using Image Based Experience Sampling and Reflection.’ Stephen envisions users interacting with images and video from his experience sampling cameras. The images are manipulated with a stylus within an interface on a Palm handheld device. That interface could also include a scanning option where you could generate a 3d model from video or orthographic snapshots, manipulate away, and send to the fabbers. Perhaps near field data transfer where each object has its own mod data ready to be annotated, transformed, paid for and directions to pick-up, or send to home printer. Who knows, any, all or none may emerge.

Intel and Carnegie Mellon are working on a version of what Dr. J Storrs Hall first termed “Utility Fog”, a form of programmable matter. Carnegie Mellon calls it Claytronics, at Intel calls it by a more formal term, Dynamic Physical Rendering.

In the Dynamic Physical Rendering Project, researchers at the Intel Pittsburgh Lablet and Carnegie Mellon University are jointly exploring a new form of smart matter which would be composed of myriad tiny robots acting together for telepresence, teleoperation, material handing/manipulation, locomotion, and distributed sensing. “Ensembles” of thousands to millions of robots would form physical analogs of virtual shapes which human senses would accept as real, eliminating cumbersome virtual reality gear and viewing angle limitations now present for most 3D visualization and telepresence applications. Likewise, such ensembles would act as reconfigurable, general-purpose robots capable of many forms of locomotion and object manipulation.

Dynamic Physical Rendering intends to create a new level of ‘directness’ where designers, engineers or users could push and pull masses of nanobots into new configurations to negotiate a new design, create a button, or a new handle. Objects then would be reduced to a database, play list and replay within a context of new tangible media where soft and hard are phase states of desire. Such an extreme should be a starting point for philosophers, sociologists, designers, future MBAs, psychologists and political scientists willing to grapple with the future of symbols, signs, meaning, power, economy and access. How will we read as well as write into this new medium? What worlds will we render after having them rendered for us for so long?

A new generation of mobile augmented reality games are gracing handhelds. Above is the first adult only one of its kind from Japan. For more on this check out ARToolkit. Rape aesthetic aside, I can see this influencing new forms of casual retail games revolving around “live packaging.”

Google Candy: Information Society Information economy Experience economy Network Society Global Village Technopoles Technocracy The Digital City Semantic Place Semantic Web Relational Spaces Responsive Architecture Cybertecture Ubicomp Ambient Intelligence Metaverses MMORPGs Computational Perception                   The Singularity Automedia ‘Everyware’ Robotic-user-interface Utility Fog Spimes Blogjects Blobjects Physical Avatars Fablab Object-Hyperlinking Blooks          Things That Think Dynamic Physical Rendering Fabjects Arphids Semacode Device Art Biots Claytronics ‘Networth’ Ambient Devices            Molecular Manufacturing Mobile Commerce Foglets from-bit-to-it

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The infusion of computation and communications into everyday life has synthesized global economy, nation states, organizations, cities, neighborhoods, architecture, down to lowly everyday objects into informatic and computational terms, in ‘soft’ terms.  In the writings of Jacobs, Castells, Latour, Gershenfeld, Mitchell, Kurzweil, and Hayles we see that this theme has evolved from science fiction techno fetish, to focused interdisciplinary academic study, to commercial pursuit. From dream, to meme, to theme.

Anew vocabulary is enabling us to discuss and negotiate these concepts that reveal a new territory between the world of bits and the world of atoms. The neologisms and statistically improbable phases in the tag cloud above offer a glimpse of how traditional concepts are being renovated as we move from architecture to responsive and relational space, or from objects to fabjects. Objects are a material language that enables us to externalize ideologies, values, beliefs and manage time and behavior. In this vein, they could be considered a way of preserving and codifying habit or ritual, a tangible system of knowledge management and well as a medium of personal and collective exploration. Similarly, language, as seen above, allows us to sketch and prototype abstract thoughts and ideas through words. Something is happening, and it is clearly being reflected linguistically, artistically, academically, and commercially. Objects are becoming as malleable as software, code and language itself.

Dr. J. Storrs Hall of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing expands this notion further in his talk ‘Nanotechnology: As Hardware Becomes Software’

‘Designing a microprocessor has more in common with programming than it does with designing a steam engine. Similar tools—specification languages, simulators, rule checkers, profilers—and a similar level of complexity dominate over the distinction between matter and bits as the output.’

“Someday soon, we could download hardware from the Net just like we download software today.” predicts James C. Ellenbogen of Mitre Corp., a Pentagon-funded research center. Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and futurist, suggests that things are becoming more informational than material; for increasingly they begin as information and end as information. Physical object-hood, it seems, is a mere phase state in the evolutionary streams the informational concept lifecycle. The softness of data and information, its potential and applications are more valuable than hard objects, or so suggests the emerging consensus.

The ‘softening’ of ‘things’, which have newfound structural and representational variability, now have a kind of flexability and dynamism that matches in pace the ‘everyday’ genesis and processing of human conventions within social systems of meanings and means. Sometimes the means are not always available for new goals to be met. In a sense these ‘soft things’ signify exploration for the eventual standardization of ‘fluid means’ for ‘openly determinable results’ that may potentially re-symbolize our understanding of object-hood. This is not an arbitrary assertion intending to commit ontological anarchy, but a descriptive account of real world developments in how material culture and context is produced, engaged with, and understood.

How might our habits and rituals change, be amplified or obsolesced?
In what ways might this new species of things reflect our values, facilitate in new ways the realization of our goals, motivations, desires?

A fellow colleague once shared with me a life changing moment he had in his first year of university. He reveled in the idea that humans had built our environment – that it was all considered in its own way, shaped. Spoons, cups, shirts, sidewalks, buildings – all made by people. In times when we see our hardware increasingly behave like software, we will undoubtedly ask “What informs the morphology and genesis of things?” Who “programmed” this? What shaped this? Why is this like this? Will the forms that constitute our objects reflect the kind flexibility that evolving languages exhibit, or will they inherit traditional qualities of proprietary material goods? Can the ‘negotiation of things” begin to resemble a collective conversation?

O’Rielly’s Web 2.0 ‘meme map’ communicates some regularities of next generation software that may prove useful and relevant sampling of characteristics.  The Web 2.0 core competencies for the purposes of this paper are, Services not packaged software, Architecture of participation, Remixable data source and data transformations, software above the level of a single device, and harnessing collective intelligence. Concepts that relate to these qualities are hackability, right to remix, perpetual beta, and ‘software gets better the more people use it.’ The result is the strategic positioning of the ‘web-as-platform’ for emergence and innovation. As object functions and forms become more soft and sensory, we may see the control of their variations and functions become transformable as object use becomes a sketching and programming platform. Examples of such software are Google , Youtube, Amazon and Facebook. In the near future the examples of organizations that produce hard goods like P&G, IKEA and General Electric may begin to populate this list, Philips the creator of Shapeways already has.

The emergent nature of human negotiation of meaning differs greatly in control and interests from the practices of existing business processes surrounding the production of commercial products. Yet, working models exist and successes have been had in the unique business models of web2.0 software-as-service start-ups that fuse qualities of each of these contrasting practices. These models are becoming more and more relevant as objects adopt increasingly “soft” qualities [Hall, Ellenbogen, Sterling]. New models that can create value through in-context, user experience based design sketching of real world objects will become important in years to come. Especially as ‘millennials’ grow to expect their hardware to be as responsive and malleable as their childhood software. These users have no qualms about privacy, and wouldn’t be surprising if simple object use flipped into a form of use performance that pays for the object itself.

stillborn-furniture

What dilemmas can we foresee at the outset when developing a system that acquires and communicates meaning through gesture, movement and morphology? By asking questions we invite ourselves into an exploration into theories of meaning, along with the relationships people inherit and build around objects and spaces through experience. Quite a networked onion really.

The notion forwarded by the conference organizers, that we can design semantics alone, in a ‘systematic and scientific way’, ignores the emergent, natural relationships that occur in the dynamic between human experience and the material world where meaning is cultivated.

“The symbol is not the sign that veils something everybody knows. Such is not its significance: on the contrary, it represents an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be. Imagination reveals to us, in the form of a more or less striking analogy, what is in the process of becoming. If we reduce this by analysis to something else universally known, we destroy the authentic value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it conforms to its value and its meaning.” (Jung, 1953)

If meaning resides, and is latent in, possible relationships we may form, then the dominant emphasis on the artifact is insufficient. Rather, our attention belongs to the relationships and experiential processes that exist ‘in-between’. We need to move away from the notion of considering our objects and spaces as absolute reified things, instead seeing them as tools that afford potential roles and relationships. This step transforms the criteria by which we create, use and understand our objects. Such an outlook on our material world opens ‘things’ up to further interpretation and negotiation of ‘what they can be’, which is as malleable and dynamic as our intentions, desires and goals.

“In fact it can be asserted in the history of philosophy that, for example, the are no things, only properties or relations” (Bochenski)

As a cultural construct, the form of an artifact has the potential to both consecrate meaning, and to confound it. In essence, form has no meaning. (Thomas, 2006) Meaning is cultivated through the relationships that arise between the properties of things and the goals of people. (RH +Mc) Form is an invitation, a window to possible experiences which can give rise to a myriad of meanings. Events and actions, following no common rules, clarify temporary instances of meaning in the act of experience. The human production and attribution of meaning to objects and spaces can be seen as an untapped renewable resource. The spectrum of user-forged relationships offers an intangible inventory that can be tangibly expressed through the medium of things.

‘The meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g. in perception, thought and decision-making.’(Block)

Block asserts in this statement that the meaning of any-thing or non-thing is the life it lives in the lives of people. Meanings of things are malleable human constructions. It could be said then, with certainty, that meaning is emergent. An attempt to affix meaning to form neuters ones perception to see what it can do or be. A thing is as much a question, as it is a material solution to a given need or want to achieve something. The loss of this dialogue is essentially what is at stake.

Conventionally forms are inanimate participants in the effort to reify and manage meaning. [Graves-Brown] As they continually become recognizable references for former experiences where meaning was formed and transformed. Here artifacts, interfaces included, have a role in the production, preservation, recall and engagement with meaning. As differing worldviews, values, metal models and motivations evolve, they frame existing structures of meaning in different ways through the creation and socialization of things.

IED Cellphone

The fear is that the semantic tyranny of industrial age design of artifacts will be carried over into a new class of objects that offer a new range of affordances. People, seduced by the surface magic of black box material culture often do not participate in the vision of things, their purpose, their role, and their possibility. [Latour] The stealth danger is deploying technologies and products like a form of non-democratic legislation. Individuals who live in materialist cultures are deeply effected when products, services and technologies come to define patterns of social life and order. In the domain of every day experience, ‘live’ moments become a form of real estate. People then are continually faced with the prescription and ingestion of the prefabricated artificial experiences, presented as social constructions of what is, and what should be, without explicit opportunities or access to contribute in a meaningful way.

How then can we explore and prescribe the criteria of systems that are based on the way in which meaning is produced, perceived, transferred, preserved and obsolesced in situ. Can we design into objects the affordances and techniques to identify what humans attend to, choices they make, what behaviors and habits are being born. By considering the relationship of form to meaning while engaging in a critical and open-minded conversation about people as producers and vessels of meaning, we can assemble a deeper understanding, one that will inform the development of new species of form-as-interface, embedded in, and inseparable from, a dynamic “ecology of means and meaning”.

A successful language of form and movement cannot be designed. What is possible is the design of s platform in which user-based formal design, semantics and functions can emerge through negotiation.

Such a debate about the inherency of meaning in form could potentially overturn how we produce, interact with, and communicate our relationships with form. People continually contribute to objects through use and “misuse”. We may, as user-creators, begin to enrich product, service and environment interactions and make them much more intimately engaged in people’s everyday lives. Form-as-interface, to manufacturing-as-service, may reveal a whole new landscape of habiture that organizations did not know their existing things/products satisfy. Conversely, it may also reveal whole new platforms, product categories and territories that may contribute to the creation of new behaviors, habits and rituals. We may succeed in democratizing authorship of product functionality, beyond a small privileged priesthood of creators.

What are the properties and dynamics of the process of social emergence of meaning? And how then can we design in, from, and through this process?

Through discussing a series of  weak signals we can begin to describe a system of behavior-enabling, experience-driven material production that is both empathetic and inclusive. A second objective is to identify new market opportunities associated with emerging technologies along with processes and models.

INTRODUCTION

How is it that we truly know the world?

What is the true nature of things?

Science tells us that the true nature of things lies beneath the surface. If we look upon a chair and ask, what is that, the common answer would be, but of course – a chair. And who would deny this? It is after all what we have learned.

A chair is not a chair however. Beyond the surface of the chair are a whole series of phenomena that are invisible to the “naked” eye. The chair is actually made up of atoms, tiny particles that are the building blocks for everything. A desk, a chair, even humans are made up of atoms. And atoms themselves are made up of even smaller subatomic particles.

Science and the scientific pursuit have proven this to us through instruments that measure, and through experimentation. The scanning tunneling microscope used for observing atoms, for example, presents us with a reality that is objective and rational. Or so it seems.

But is this really how we know the world?

Knowing seems to be indicative of a deeper visceral engagement with the world. One that is mediated through the senses and understood only after repeated sensory impressions.

Experience is the mother of all invention.

Reality is not objective and rational. Rather it is a subjective experience dependant on the one doing the perceiving. And it is precisely this dependency that has given birth not only to the apparatus for sensing, but also to that which the senses pick up. There is a certain mutuality or reciprocity to the phenomenal world in the way that acts of expression and perception form mutually co-dependant relationships. If the bee cannot smell the pollen what good is it to the pollen producing plant? Thus, our perceptual ways of knowing are tethered to the world itself, intimately weaved, and not separate from it.

Science and technology however have distanced themselves from these corporeal ways of knowing preferring instead a rational and objective outlook. And has as a result of these extensions created a gap between nature and us. Between the mind, and the body.

Take for example, the term “naked eye” as it is used above. As if the eye that is naked is insufficient without the prosthesis of scientific technology. The assumption itself that the eye is naked to begin with is skewed. These assumptions, that have in essence made their way into a common language suggests a deeply engrained prejudice that displaces the senses from their natural ability to pick up what is given, and instead suggests that the true nature of things somehow lie beneath all appearances. This way of thinking has not only displaced the senses from their inherent right to know, but has distanced us from what I would call proper ways of thinking about the world and our place in it, by privileging a rational techno-scientific outlook over one grounded in the bodies corporeal ways of knowing.

I would like to close that gap and reclaim the rightful place of the Sensus Communis as an intelligent and rational faculty that can, and should inform our forages into technological and scientific pursuits.

Over the past several years I have been deeply engaged with a body of work that advocates for the inclusion of the human senses into a common practice. One that states that the senses are the foundational support for everything we experience and for everything that we create as a result of those experiences. As such, the senses are something we should be paying more attention to, and giving them their due credit.

In consideration of the many facets of multi-sensorial intelligence, this paper will briefly touch on three aspects I think are important in bringing to bear the relevance and significance of a return to the Sensus Communis.

FOOTNOTE: “Sensus Communis”

Aristotle postulated a central faculty capable of uniting all the senses, synthesizing what each sense picked up to form a coherent whole in the mind. He called this the “Sensus Communis”.

THE SENSES ARE PRIMARY MEDIA
The first will explore the senses as primary media in how the whole world is mediated through the senses. And look at the senses as natural communication systems as a way to understand the mechanisms that place and register meaning through experience.

ADVOCACY – A CRITICAL AND REFLEXIVE AWARENESS
In the face of the technologization of human and social capability this trajectory gives voice to the dimensions of analogue human ability. Arguing for the often-neglected abilities of the human senses as a way to challenge the technologization of perception working towards the inclusion of the analogue senses into the dominant discourse.

THE SENSES AND SOCIETY
The second focuses on the senses and society, viewing every object as the subjects of perception, as things that mediate our interactions and contribute to the construction and diffusion of a techno-scientific outlook. An outlook and a way of thinking about the world that has affected the very way we see the world and thus, how we perceive it, unquestionably having significant impacts into our social and cultural production.

THE SENSES ARE PRIMARY MEDIA

Our first and best way of engaging with the world is through the senses.

We see, hear, taste, feel, smell and move about in the world – all visceral experiences.

The primary mechanism through which our reality is grounded in the world is through our senses. We know the world through the senses.

When we touch the world, that world equally pushes back. And thus that thing is registered through the sense of touch as a thing, but as a thing that is sensed through my hands as a cup; its weight, the heat of its contents, whether is it full or empty, and not what is just thought to be a cup, or a wall for that matter. Although haptic feedback in definition is limited to that of touch, but extends as a metaphor for lack of a word, and translates into the domains of the other senses.

What is the haptic equivalent for smell, for sight, sound for movement, etc? We push and the world pushes back. With every step I take the ground pushes back equally on my foot, this is a true registering of the world. I do not need a formula or a theorem such as gravity to understand this. I know through repeated sensory experience that it is so. No theorem, explanation, or description can beat that.

The world is out there, whether we are here or not, whether we act out in it or not. Things happen in it all the time.

If the senses mediate the world and the world mediates the senses then when we look out, the world looks back at us, we touch and get touched back, we call out and the world calls back.

Each of our senses provides us with a different way interpreting and comprehending the world. A tree looks a certain way, feels a certain way, sounds a certain way, and each sense is finely tuned to pick up all these things. It is the picture built up by the senses together, the synthesizing act of the Sensus Communis that registers the tree, or rather the experience of the tree, as it is felt, seen, heard.

Can I describe a tree and have you comprehend it if you have never seen, heard or touched a tree ever? Probably not.

As children we learn from our exploratory forages and inquisitive natures through our experiences – through our sensorial experiences. These are grounded in reality by way that is not abstract, it is real, it is felt, it is tasted, it is heard, and thus the senses as primary media are the go-link to the phenomenal world and in turn inform all our ideas thereafter.

Piaget wrote of infants, that the world was essentially a thing to be sucked, indicative of the primacy and intimacy of the senses in discovering and knowing the world, in this case through taste; the mouth and the sense of taste conferrable to the act of living.

Taking the Sensus Communis as the experiential grounding of the world into a reality that we can understand and grasp at deep visceral levels, proposing that the world is not made up of things or objects, but rather of experiences, considering the nature of experience as more real than things. For things only have meaning once we know what they are. And how we know what they are is deeply entrenched in our interactions and experiences with them.

The senses are primary media that are intelligent so to speak, they don’t lie and we are tied to the world, part of it, not separate from it.
As a young adolescent teen I had the unpleasant experience of being told not to trust my own common sense. The setting was a mathematics class where I had told the teacher that the method by which I had come to my conclusions was as a result of my own common sense. The teacher was unimpressed and stated very flatly that my answer was not good enough – that my answer was not really an answer, and that I must use the proper theorem to prove it. What better proof is there than a common sense I thought. My attempts to stand up and argue that my common sense answer made more sense than that of the theorem did little to impress my teacher, in the end earning me only partial marks. Needless to say, that I was upset and depressed about having to forfeit my deeply sensed intuition to some theorem.

What I have realized since then is that what at the time to me was just common sense was actually superior to that of the theorem, simply because the theorem was an abstract representation of the original insight that gave rise to it in the first place.

What I had, and what my teacher missed was that my common sense had a real and tangible quality to it, a reality that had as its basis the phenomenal world, a reality placed and registered through experience.

Instead of capitalizing on these insights I was steered away from the opportunity to expand the horizons of perception, and perceptual ways of knowing.

I was being asked to deny what I felt viscerally, intuitively through the body so to speak and accept an abstracted reality, one step removed from what I could see, hear, touch, taste, and move through.

These are our first ways of knowing the world – the senses inform our world – they are the primary medium through which we touch taste feel the world. They inform our ideas of the world in a visceral manner; they explain the world through deep mechanisms. The rest are ideas about our experiences, one step removed from reality so to speak.

(rough draft 1 – 2 sections to go)