George Nelson got it right when he said, “The connections game is a process of building patterns. Patterns make things intelligible.” In this time of transitions we all need to play the connections game if we are to make any sense of what is going on. But Nelson also threw in a qualifier, “The ability to make connections depends upon the homework you’ve done”
This is why I was so delighted when I came across an interview with William Gibson, promoting his new book, “Pattern Recognition”, where he uses the word “Apophenia”. This is defined as “…the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” But I do think the word would be more useful if the word ‘spontaneous’ was dropped from the definition.
Human beings do seemed to have a propensity to create patterns of connections. We want to believe in a meaningful world and a world that conforms to our beliefs about it. This is where I think the word ‘apophenia’, meaning “the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things” could be a useful tool in our box for building patterns. Checking for apophenia when are playing the connection game, could be a means of seeing whether what we are building is just wishful thinking or a pattern that conforms to our prejudices or whether it is solid enough as guide for action.
Author: Richard
An antidote to short-termism
If you are looking for a rather longer term perspective on current affairs than those served up by most of the news channels, Imanuel Wallerstein publishes about two commentaries a month where he puts current events into a five hundred year context.
Vanity Searching
It’s amazing what you can stumble across when you go vanity searching. (“Hall of Fame”, moi? I know its pathetic, but we all have our low moments when our egos need stroking.) More interestingly “Usability and beyond” does look like a good gateway site, with a very handy, extensive glossary.
11 October 2003 – So much for vanity, this site seems to have disappeared from the cybersphere
Designing Design
My friend Clive Richards sent me the url of Beth Mazur’s IDblog which looks like a good gateway in to the world of information design, usability and design in general. Scanning the entries I came across a piece by Clement Mok which should be compulsory reading for all designers. In the piece “Designers: Time for Change” Mok argues that “…designers are currently a divided, fractious lot, whose professional esteem is considerably lower than it should be. Unlike other skilled professionals, designers are viewed as outsiders of uncertain prestige, and are frequently excluded from participation in business enterprises except in a narrowly circumscribed, post-hoc context. A consideration of principles would suggest that a skilled designer should be present throughout a development project, to facilitate cohesion and effectiveness of planning and execution. Instead, designers are often summoned to perform only limited, specific tasks after managerial and fiscal specialists have already made crucial decisions?often inefficiently with little or no depth to their understanding of the dynamics of information and its consequences. These problems all point to the need for us to define, and to design, what is meant by design.”
My only real quarrel with Mok’s position is that his focus on design is a little narrow and that his argument would have been stronger had he taken the ICSID’s definition of design “Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life-cycles. Therefore, design is the central factor of innovative humanisation of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange.”
There should be links
This is an entry without any links. And there should be hundred of links. The life of my friend Rosie Dalziel demanded links. On Monday night she died. She had been ill, but even so the fact that she died so suddenly was a shock. Now normally I would not think that this was an appropriate place to record something of such a personal nature, but part of my reaction to her death falls within some of the underlying themes of what I am trying to do here.
I feel angry. Not unusual you might think, feeling angry when some who might have many more years of life dies. But this was different. This was about what happens to people who are trying to do something genuinely new. This is about how hard and lonely it is to be a pioneer. This is about a life cut short before a powerful vision could be realised. This is about the probability that her death will mean that she never gets the recognition she deserved. And this about the fact that when you put her name in to google there are no links and there should be.
Jumping on the bandwagon
I’ve been interested in the idea of blogging for about a year or so. When I first stumbled across the phenomenon in a newspaper article and looked at a few, I was struck by the way it seemed like a return to the spirit of early days of the web. Some of the key sites I used in the early days were the hotlists – collections of urls of interesting stuff on the web. With the good ones, compiled by people who knew what they were talking about, there was a sense of the hotlist as a doorway into an area of ideas. The best blogs have a similar feel with the bonus that the writers often have interesting ideas themselves.
Designing For Interactive Media
At the end of the Nineties I got involved in an exciting project, working forGeorge Soros ‘s Open Society Institute. The idea was to promote electronic publishing and the web in the countries that had been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Of course, once we got started we found that the idea didn’t need that much promotion and that there were plenty of very competent people doing it already. But despite that I think that they welcomed the contact with people from the West and the slightly different perspective that we brought with us. I worked with people from Romania, Macedonia and Serbia and learnt a lot I’m still digesting. This piece was from the last event I attended in Lithuania – a text to accompany a lecture. I include it here, because one of the reasons I have been reluctant to set up my own web site was, because having been pontificating about the subject for years, I was sure that hubris was hovering and that my site would display at least some of the sins I had been attacking. I guess we’ll see whether that’s true.
Designing For Interactive Media
Managing Creativity
I wrote this as a “think” piece for Karen Mahony’s web consultancy Mahony Associates. I worked with Karen for a number of years, first at Wolff Olins and then with her consultancy. Karen now has a small studio – baba – in Prague and is doing some very interesting work, very different from the corporate stuff she was doing in London.
As We Might Learn
I wrote this for my friend Nick Routledge, who I met on the internet, when he asked me to write something for his World3 website back in the early days of the web – late 1995 to be more exact. For a while it attracted quite a lot of attention. Sadly, World3, moved around quite a lot each time changing its url, a number of links to the piece from other sites got broken and then finally it disappeared for a while. Fortunately, Nick’s friend Jon Van Oast rescued it a while back and little bit of internet history is now preserved on his site. Although in internet years its now quite old, I still think there are some interesting ideas in here and some of the things I suggest I’d still like to see.
Update 15 October 2009 Sadly Jon Van Oast’s site is down so I am now linking to Wayback Machine:
“As We Might Learn”
It Seems to be a Meme
This was a piece I wrote for Nick Routledge’s monumental, labyrinthine, hypertext “Space without a Goal”. It never got put up, because it coincided with “a change in direction” in Nick’s life when he largely abandoned his work with the web and hypertext. Fragments of the site are preserved on Jon Van Oast’s site www.scribble.com. When I dug this out of my files I was surprised to see how long ago I wrote it. If I hadn’t dated it (10 July 1996) I would have said it was more recent. Anyway, this was my first, slightly desperate, attempt to capture some of the ideas I had been thinking about purposive drift for some years before. I circulated it to a few people as well as Nick. John Chris Jones, one of the most perceptive writers on design, who I had long admired, claimed that getting a copy helped him get unstuck and complete writing his last book, “The Internet and Everyone” (You can reach an on-line version here). Some parts of it are included in his book. I also sent a copy to Pierre Levy, who has some interesting ideas on the web and consciousness. Nick had mention the idea of purposive drift to a friend of Pierre Levy’s – in his reply he thanked me and said his ” beautiful and smart” friend had been very touched. What he thought about it wasn’t clear!