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Ripe Axioms - Interact 2017
- 2. What's the thing we’ll realize here and now that the future will thank us for? - SIMON NORRIS
- 4. What If, Could Be An Historical Fable of the Future Richard Saul Wurman 1976
- 5. What If, Could Be An Historical Fable of the Future Richard Saul Wurman 1976
- 8. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011)
- 9. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011) (whole is greater than sum of its doubling by 15%)
- 10. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011)
- 11. FINITE-TIME SINGULARITY TIME Adapted from Scale, Dr. Geoffrey West (2016)
- 12. TIME SINGULARITY Adapted from Scale, Dr. Geoffrey West (2016) INNOVATION
- 13. SINGULARITY TIME Adapted from Scale, Dr. Geoffrey West (2016)
- 16. Information Architecture of This Mess CARTESIAN MODEL OF SPACE “It Depends”
- 19. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace Margaret Wertheim 1999 On the level playing field of Cartesian cosmology we are nowhere special because the very definition of relativistic space guarantees that there is no place special to be
- 20. One use is as good as another, one life is as good as another – if the price is right. This is the industrial doctrine of the interchangeability of parts, and we apply it to places, to creatures, and to our fellow humans as if it were the law of the world. Bringing It to the Table - On Farming and Food Wendell Barry 2009
- 21. ARRANGEMENT OPTIMIZED FOR UNBOUNDED SUPERLINEAR GROWTH FOREVER CARTESIAN MODEL OF SPACE “It Depends” Information Architecture of This Mess
- 24. COMPLIMENTARY METHODS AND PRACTICES Information Architecture of This Mess CARTESIAN MODEL OF SPACE “It Depends” ARRANGEMENT OPTIMIZED FOR UNBOUNDED SUPERLINEAR GROWTH FOREVER
- 25. What's the thing we’ll realize here and now that the future will thank us for? - SIMON NORRIS
- 26. Oblique Strategies Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt 1975
- 27. axiom 1. A proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true. 2. A universally established principle or law that is not a necessary truth.
- 39. YANYU FFF
- 41. Niels Bohr 1932 The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth
- 43. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011)
- 44. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011)
- 45. From The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations, Dr. Geoffrey West (2011)
- 46. VALUE IS INHERENT NOT “IT DEPENDS” Information Architecture of The Opposite Paradigm All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and the matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement. The Nature Of Order - Book 1 Christopher Alexander 2002
- 49. Order is Prior to Function Julian Street Inn - Shelter for the Homeless Mentally Ill Christopher Alexander 1990
- 50. Need is a ham sandwich. Function is the movement of our bowels. - Richard Saul Wurman - Louis Kahn
- 53. “So that’s what I’m really getting at is the existence of a level of thought or a level of reality where order in space is such a deep phenomenon that it’s capable of generating all our activities as architects or as builders and that function, ornament, and what have you will all come into play as byproducts of that level of observation and thought.”
- 56. ARRANGEMENT OPTIMIZED FOR BOUNDED, SUBLINEAR GROWTH VALUE IS INHERENT NOT “IT DEPENDS” Information Architecture of The Opposite Paradigm
- 57. A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time Patrick Geddes via @grescoe
- 60. COMPLIMENTARY METHODS AND PRACTICES ARRANGEMENT OPTIMIZED FOR BOUNDED, SUBLINEAR GROWTH VALUE IS INHERENT NOT “IT DEPENDS” Information Architecture of The Opposite Paradigm
- 61. You And Your User Are One
- 62. The Nature Of Order - Book 1 Christopher Alexander 2002 I believe it is in the nature of matter, that it is soaked through with self
- 64. You And Your User And The Thing You’re Making Are One
- 65. Inherent value is empirically testable through a “mirror of self”
- 67. FACE YOURSELF
- 68. VALUE IS INHERENT NOT “IT DEPENDS” COMPLIMENTARY METHODS AND PRACTICES ARRANGEMENT OPTIMIZED FOR BOUNDED, SUBLINEAR GROWTH Information Architecture of The Opposite Paradigm
- 69. Long Strange Trip Amer Bar-Lev 2017
- 70. What would it be like to live in a mental world where one’s reasons for making something functionally and one’s reasons for making something a certain shape, or in a certain ornamental way are actually coming from precisely the same place in you – precisely the same place. - Christopher Alexander
- 71. PLEASE YOURSELF
Editor's Notes
- I’m eager to learn from the speakers here today, to see if anybody’s got a better answer to Simon’s question than the one I came up with. ...which is that history has shown us that it’s quite unlikely any such realizations will be acted on or listened to - especially if our ambition is to affect change beyond our community of practice.
- Half a century ago, the international community of design practice met each spring in Colorado, at the IDCA - the International Design Conference in Aspen. Richard Saul Wurman gave a talk there in 1970 that was rife with the kinds of realizations that future generations would have thanked him for, had any of them been acted on. From the mid 1960s until Lou Kahn died in 1974, Wurman spent half of his time trying to push the brilliant realizations that won him near-instant fame in the design community (he was the youngest Board member in IDCA history) into the popular consciousness and public services sector, where their implementation would have up-ended and re-directed decades of wrong-headed approaches to urban planning and the design of the public environment. Traveling exhibitions, workbooks for school children, comparative mapping of census data onto geo-spatial visualizations, two special issues of Design Quarterly, an animated short film... he did all of these things, and more. Even so: society and culture at large remained largely unaffected. Image Credit: Lance Wyman, used by permission
- Chairing the 1976 AIA National conference – a gathering he called Architecture of Information – would turn out to be RSW’s swan song as an architect. Less than a year later, Murphy Levy Wurman architects closed its doors for good. Perhaps this is why he chose to close the conference with the performance of a keynote fable instead of a keynote speech. And why its protagonist is a little fat guy with a beard who extols the virtue of learning from failure, and embracing the opposite paradigm.
- .. this protagonist is called the Commissioner of Curiosity and Imagination. He’s a self-appointed commissioner, and recruits each person he talks with to be a member of his commission. The purpose of which, it seems, is to point out the myriad ways that the citizens of the city were sabotaging their own interests - unwittingly - as a function of the structure of their concepts, and the limits of their language. When the Commissioner asked a policeman to tell him about the problems in the city, and what might be done to address them, the policeman could only point to pre-made answers. To products he had seen or used or heard of before, Starting with “how” as opposed to “what”. It was the same when the Commissioner spoke with teachers, or urban planners: the answer was always and only this one word: MORE.
- MORE. More jails, more policemen, more cop-cars, more night sticks. MORE standardized tests, more curriculum committees, more pencils, more books. MORE streets, more lanes, more light poles, more benches. More solutions. More products. The commissioner’s assessment was that the only two words that the people of What-If, in the city ever used were MORE... and when the process of More had bottomed out, they’d then use the word NO.
- What the Commissioner of Curiosity saw as an uber-pattern in the enterprise of citizens in the fabled city of What-If in the land of Could-be is the same pattern that can be seen in any of the cities on our Earth today. This is a picture I took of a presentation by Dr. Geoffrey West, a physicist and complexity-theorist from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico USA. What the graph behind him shows is the scaling pattern of human greed – this is what MORE looks like over time.
- When plotted on a logarithmic chart, West shows that there is a remarkable constancy in the data that describe the growth patterns of the things that people do and make. This one shows income, GDP, crime and the registration of new patent filings: all at once. West’s analysis shows that when you double the size of something that people do, like GDP or new patent filings or whatever... when you double the scale of the works of man, they tend to deliver more than just 2x performance...
- Most of the things we do on the basis of MORE deliver a 15% surplus each time we double in scale. Which, before long, starts to look like this: what West calls super-linear growth. Surpluses start to multiply, and the rate of growth can and often does go up up up. More more more
- Unfortunately, these superlinear growth patterns are inherently, fundamentally unsustainable. They always result in a total system collapse that West calls the finite-time singularity
- In order to avoid total system collapse, while still operating enterprises on the basis of unbounded superlinear growth, the singularity must be circumvented by innovation.
- Innovation pushes the event horizon for total system collapse forward in time. And if the enterprise intends to continue to operate in terms of MORE, and the pattern of unbounded growth, it’s going to have to keep innovating.
- The fact that the dynamics of unbounded growth and innovation necessarily entail an eventual total collapse is not in dispute. It’s not a theory. These, according to Dr. West, are are the rules of the game. It’s a wicked game, because each time you pre-empt the singularity via innovation and push collapse farther and farther out into the future, the interval between now and the next singularity gets shorter and shorter. Innovators have to innovate their innovations more innovatively as we go.
- It’s a mess. Our addiction to the profits that we can pocket each time we dumb-ly double the size of the thing we’re building – and the ever shortening interval between the last extraction of profit from the system and the next one means, or seems to mean, that collateral damage to the people and places that’re not at the front of the pack are and will increasingly be left behind.
- If only there were a handbook for making sense of any mess… We use the lenses and practices of information architecture to make sense out of the chaos of digital products and services – why not use this stuff to make sense of the chaos of fundamentally unsustainable macroeconomic and social structures? She did say *any* mess… And Wurman’s original conception of information architecture may have been pre-digital, but the scale he applied it at was as big as the biggest cities imaginable in 1976 — Anticipating the singularity we’re trying to innovate our way out of with only this deeply flawed philosophy of MORE to guide us.
- What I’d like to do with the rest of my time this morning is take you through an as-is analysis of the information architecture of the mess we’re all in today, and then posit an alternative that’s optimized for sustainability, as opposed to the existing emphasis on MORE. Any information architecture can be described in terms of what things mean, how they’re arranged, and the dynamics of meaningful arrangement: ontology, taxonomy and choreography. I believe the root of the current mess, its ontology, is Cartesian-ism: the avant- grade philosophy of 17th century Europe that obliterates the wholeness of people, places and things through a cosmology based on dualism.
- A cosmology, as Christopher Alexander wrote here in this early manuscript version of a work called The Nature of Order, is the most basic picture a person has, in his mind, of what kind of place the world is, and what its structure is, and what his own real action ship to this world might be.
- Cartesian dualism gives us a world-picture that’s spit into the “real stuff” of matter and energy, and the we-hope-some-of-it-is-real-after-we-die world of spirit. Or soul. This world picture is mechanistic, and provides a means for investigating material and phenomena by breaking ‘em up into bits and understanding each bit.
- Cartesian cosmology also relies on the idea that space is mostly empty, and entirely neutral.
- The ontology that’s derived from this Cartesian cosmology says that meaning and value are not inherent with any particular agglomeration of matter, or in any set of coordinates on the map. Value and meaning are determined through the work of breaking things up and understanding the bits. Meaning and value are a matter of “it depends”.
- With a cosmology of neutral space, where value and meaning are a matter of “it depends”, it’s not wrong to then find ourselves arranging things in ways that are optimized for MORE. Why not keep doubling, when each doubling generates a surplus?
- One of the keys to arranging things in ways that are optimized for dumb doubling, and in ways that maximize the company’s ability to re-assign meaning and value in a pivot or big innovation, is to get rid of the unusual bits. So that whatever it is we’re doing right now fits with everything else.
- Jeff Patton likes to draw a picture of a cow when he’s coaching product teams, and to note that we all want to think that we’re the cow team. While in reality, I’m on the flank steak team. And you’re on the sirloin team. Image Credit: Jeff Patton, used by permission
- Which takes us to the third dimension of the as-is information architecture of this mess: how we-all then interact with systems and each other in service of unbounded superlinear growth and the Cartesian cosmology of It Depends.l
- The thing we could realize together, here and now, the thing that the future may well thank us for, is recognition that our ways of doing – our methods and practices – are optimized for quickening calamity. What we-all do is making all of this worse, not better.
- There’s a brilliant tool from the mid 1970s, from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, forg etting un-stuck when your’re stuck. They’re called Oblique Strategies, and the one I think we’d do well to adopt is to discard an axiom. Or two.
- These axioms that the future will thank us for discarding are so hard to get rid of or evolve away from because they’re so familiar, so worn-in, that they operate in ways that we don’t question. We take them as given truths, when in fact they’re just propositions. The first axiom I propose we discard, here and now, is Form Follows Function.
- Some of the most extreme examples of work realized on the basis of this axiom were designed by students and teachers at The Bauhaus toward the mid-end of the 20th century.
- Image Credit: USA - 1998: 62p x 55p color illustration of Uncle Sam shrugging his shoulders above headline "Buy bonds?" (The Detroit Free Press/MCT via Getty Images)
- Image Credit: the collection of Richard Saul Wurman. Used by permission
- For three hundred years our mechanistic world view has disconnected us from our selves. We have a picture of the universe that is powerful and apparently accurate, but no clear sense of how we, our own selves, enter into this picture. We have a disconnected vision of reality, which seems secure, which seems strong and objective – but which leaves me out. My experience of self, my own actual person, my existence of self, my own actual person, my existence as I experience it every day is not part of the “objective” world-picture. So, in my daily encounter with the world, I have to make do with a world-picture that fails to connect me to the world. I flail around in it and struggle…