Spark Card: Finding New Search Images

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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
todd_0755.jpgHofstadter'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?

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Designing Design: Take 3 SiPs

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Russian.dolls.hugeset.arp.jpgMaintain at least 3 Systems-In-Play throughout the process you are designing. Generally speaking, I'll call these "metasystem," "system-in-focus," and "nested system."

The system in focus is the system we intend to most directly engage and influence. It is through this system that we expect to form the basis for the decisions and actions that the design process evokes in the participants.

A metasystem is one that contains the system in focus as well as others in an integrated fashion. Wikipedia offers a useful description:

"A metasystem is formed by the integration of a number of initially independent components, such as molecules, cells or individiduals, and the emergence of a system steering or controlling their interactions. As such, the collective of components becomes a new, goal-directed individual, capable of acting in a coordinated way. This metasystem is more complex, more intelligent, and more flexible in its actions than the initial component systems."

A nested system is, of course, a system that is one of many component systems that are all integrated into the system in focus. 

In essence, what I'm saying here is engage with your design as if it were a matryoshka, albeit probably not quite at the depth of pictured above.

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Finding Unseen Messages

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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

I get a kick out of my MacMail message as it searches for new emails. "Finding unseen messages" seems so easy for it to do. Within seconds it either reports that there are no new messages or that I have something in my "in box." How I wish my mind could work like this! Einstein's comment: "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education" certainly holds true with me. How is it that we become so trapped by our assumptions and what we have been told as truth that we often fail to see what is right in front of our face? I wish I had a reset button that would take help me see what's in my inbox ... differently!

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