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.

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Background: Literacy was once considered as the ability to sign your name and read the bible in Latin. Times have changed. There are now a multiplicity of literacies relating to all aspects of life- presenting copious amounts of choices, opportunities and potential outcomes.

Questions:
What new literacies are likely to emerge from the conditions present in today’s context?
How does literacy impact one’s ability to access and participate meaningfully in socio-cultural-economic systems?
What is the role of new literacies in the knowledge/experience age?
What can we learn from so-called pre-literate contexts?

Assumptions:
1) Literacy = Empowerment
2) Literacy = Imagination Potential
3) Lifestyle = Literacy
4) Imagination = Empowerment

Note: We view system ecologies as networks of dilemmas presenting multiple choices-possibilities and potential outcomes.

VUCA & THE ASYMMETRIC TRADITION

US Army War College credo, describes the qualities of our present context as being volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). One might suggest that this context has long existed and is more of a tradition rather than a trend. Meaning that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity within our systems and our environments has, for the most part, been the inspirational source and medium enabling for the emergence of literacy, imagination, innovation and change.

It is not our technologies but our literacies and their resulting imaginations that enable us to compete, achieve and survive.

ASYMMETRIC LITERACY (A WORKING DEFINITION)
It is beyond question that we do come to know many things indirectly, and that there appears to be an admixture of the indirect in every acquisition of knowledge. – J.M. Bochenski The Methods of Contemporary Thought

Literacy is a transformative “tool.” Literacies empower both the means and capacities required to identify and transform choices and opportunities in our environment into outcomes. Each literacy provides its own means of access and understanding through its own forms of knowledge acquisition and expression. Historically, literacies have emerged and evolved alongside social, cultural and technological change. The pace of this change is increasing, as are its implications on all aspects of human socio-cultural-economic achievement. The speed and ease with which we can now move from concept to percept has “catalyzed” the need for increased imagination and new forms of creative thinking around process and purpose.

An asymmetric approach to literacy would encourage development and refinement of unorthodox forms of knowledge acquisition and expression, in contrast and relative to, the symmetrical contexts of the learner/practitioner. Asymmetric literacy is acceptance and traversal of possibility beyond defined, practiced or codified limitations; in the ability to exploit and affect the most potential from the least characteristics latent or manifest within a system; and in promoting the ability to shape one’s own system of possibility and context rather than being shaped by another’s.

This form of literacy might emerge from a self-awareness and lifestyle that increasing one’s access to original experiences which people have had no prior contact or exposure. These experiences often result in obtaining new knowledge in turn augmenting one’s “scope of awareness and interpretation. It is assumed that the metaphors presented within these original experiences would help to fill in and bridge the gaps left over from symmetrical states of being and build a more complete and robust palette for the imagination. The goal of which would be to extend the breadth and depth of empowerment in individuals and organizations.

Conversely asymmetric literacy might focus on better understanding the characteristics and meanings of symmetries, patterns, codified limitations, traditions and conventions, whereby the asymmetrically literate would develop a careful appreciation for structure, harmony and balance in light of contributing and extending new benefits to the greatest amount of people.

How do we increase the capacity for individuals and organizations to identify- test and explore the conditions and possible experiences we wish to elicit from this atypical resource?

APPLYING MCLUHAN’S LAWS OF MEDIA TO ASYMMETRIC LITERACY:

What does it enhance?
Scope of possibility; empowerment
What does it obsolesce?
Symmetric Literacy; Perceived limitations
What does it retrieve?
Choice and Opportunity
What does is flip into?
Symmetric Literacy

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Purpose

The purpose of this material is to describe points of departure framing a foundation for exploration into nature of Asymmetry as it applies to Imagination, as a promising subject.  Our intention is to produce useful and teachable tools and methods for identifying business applications and identifying alternative and complementary knowledge products for education.

Introduction – Scope of asymmetry

Global Security defines asymmetry as it is described in the United States Army; “dissimilarities in organization, equipment, doctrine, capabilities, and values.”

For the purpose of framing our scope and use of asymmetry we describe Symmetrical Literacy as the widely held knowledge of, and participation in forms of learning, expression and living that are established and practiced. They are in balance with the way people read and write, interpret, intuit, act and interact towards and with each other and the world. Solely thinking within the constraints of this “space” limit individuals and organizations from making the leaps required to engage in new value creation.

}  Is there a shift of focus from symmetrical to asymmetrical literacy?

}  Are we facing an emergent need to combine and synthesize a spectrum of literacies into a more comprehensive whole?

}  Is there an all-encompassing ecology of literacies from which a more potent,

“full-spectrum imagination” can rise?

Both literacy and imagination standards are embedded within shared tradition of increasing complexity, competition and co-operation.  The imagination has always been, and will always be, the ultimate human resource: shaping and defining our achievements, or lack thereof.

We believe that multiple literacies add to and increase the “imagination potential” of individuals and organizations, and that this will emerge or be discovered more so within the realm of asymmetry.

Asymmetry is more than the opposite of symmetry, and represents a vast range of alternative possibilities to the imagination, beyond what is known and accepted. One form of asymmetry in action may be described as the unconventional, unpredictable, non-traditional utility of elements and properties found within everyday technological, political, economic social, cultural systems. We believe the complimentary concepts of symmetry-asymmetry are both present in every context and can be considered a continuum rather than a dichotomy. The shift in what is considered symmetric or asymmetric behaviors is always coming in and out of balance as technology, custom and routine are individually, socially and culturally negotiated. What is asymmetric is continually reframed and restocked by the rate in which ways of thinking are adopted and antiquated. Meaning we are defining what is symmetric by what we do collectively.

}  What great human achievement has not been asymmetric?

}  To what extent will the education of the left side of the brain, the concrete and sequential be automated?

}  Will educators of the future favor the study and development of the imagination as a discipline?

Forms of Asymmetry to be EXPLORED

}  Outside of the Known – Venturing into the unknown to survey new forms of possibility. Challenging perceived limits and barriers for the purpose of retrieving unique and beneficial knowledge.

}  Atypical Function, Typical Forms – Every variable in the environment can be leveraged either normally or abnormally. Inside or outside of conventional use, asymmetry in action is the nontraditional or novel utilization of resources disproportionate to another individual or organization.

}  Asymmetric Thought and Behavior – Exploring deviations from the excepted norms of how one should think and behave.  Seeing different, acting different and being different in light of motivations that exist for no other, providing glimpses into tomorrows normal.

Coping, let alone competing, within this context will be defined by individuals and organizations that; shape “issues” rather than be shaped by them (US Army); who have the ability to apply vision, understanding, clarity, and agility to volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous situations (Johansen); and integrate, non-linear approaches to seeing, knowing and doing- Integrative Thinking (Martin).

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.