JOURNAL: daily
JOURNEY: a day's space; day's travel
JOURNAL KEEPING: daily recording of one's travels through life/time dimensions.
- from The AND workbook, 1981 (Matt and Gail Taylor)
Although we are not keeping to the spirit of daily journaling, we like the idea of making public some of our thoughts as we travel through time. And, we'd love to hear your thoughts about our thoughts!
Entries in Assumptions (3)
Spark Card: Finding New Search Images
We are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors that we each possess are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels. - Douglas Hofstadter
Hofstadter's 'perceptual attractors' are what we call search images. These images are the perceptual cues we look for to identify and assess the systems that make up our world. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity, provides a great example by telling the story of what ecologist Steve Packard learned over numerous attempts to grow a prairie from scratch. He has some of the necessary search images going into his exploration, but they proved insufficient:... He felt yet another ingredient must be missing which prevented a living system from snapping together. He started reading the botanical history of the area and studying the oddball species...
"What the heck is this?" he'd asked the botanist. "It's not in the books, it's not listed in the state catalogue of species. What is it?" The botanist had said, "I don't know. It could be a savanna blazing star, but there aren't any savannas here, so it couldn't be that. Don't know what is." What one is not looking for, one does not see.
... An epiphany of sorts overtook Packard when he watched the piles of his seed accumulate in his garage. The prairie seed mix was dry and fluffy-like grass seed. The emerging savanna seed collection, on the other hand, was "multicolored handfuls of lumpy, oozy, glop," ripe with pulpy seeds and dried fruits. Not by wind, but by animals and birds did these seeds disperse. The thing -- the system of coevolved, interlocking organisms -- he was seeking to restore was not a mere prairie, but a prairie with trees: a savanna... once Packard got a "search image" of the savanna in his mind, he began to see evidence of it everywhere.
What search images are you using to identify the key ingredients and instructions for assembling the project or venture you're working on?
Tomorrow Makers
in Assumptions, Systems, Transfer, tools, design
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Seeing Beyond Sight
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
Yesterday I heard a podcast about blind teenagers becoming photographers. Tony Deifell, a teacher and photographer, has created a new book called Seeing Beyond Sight. He tells this story: After the photographs have been developed, we, as a class, talk about each one. I remark about what I see and the student acknowledges whether this was her intent. Sometimes, Tony, assumes that the photographer missed the image she was trying to get. In one such case where there was a photograph of a sidewalk with a crack, he assumed that the creator had missed. But, the young photographer said, "No, this is what I wanted. My cane gets caught in the crack and I trip. I want to send this picture to the city department so they can fix the crack." Tony went on to talk about the letter she wrote to the city acknowledging how they must have no idea how such a thing could be bothersome. In fact, she went on, it is only because I am blind that I notice it. (The crack got fixed!)
Search Images
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
-Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
Yesterday I read that human creativity is at least 25,000 years older than we previously thought. This made me think of one of my favorite fiction books about creativity, The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel. I don't know that Auel thought that her book was about creativity; rather she was telling an incredible story of survival and emergence of a young Homo sapiens girl being raised by a Neanderthal clan. Her story was rebuked by many scientists and anthropologists and then, with more discovery, Auel's story became quite plausible and many of the ficticious parts in her stories have proven to be fact.
I have heard that 80% of inventions come from the beginner's mind.
