Reflection

The future has already begun

Imagine a world where the academic research is not so much focused on increasing academic "productivity", by more or less automating it by disciplinary procedures (which is so flagrantly Industrial Age-like, isn't it?). Imagine if the university would also provide a home to people who want to be creative in the manner of guiding our society's evolution; enhancing our society's ability to self-organize, change course... create both new forms of knowledge, and whole new ways of being creative.

What would this be like?

The prototype portfolio provided here is our prototype answer.

We emphasize that these are only highlights – and ask forgiveness of our members and collaborators whose work has not been included.

Knowledge media

Meme Media and Webbles

Imagine if knowledge were not contained (only) in traditional books and articles on the one side, and in films and records and such on another – but in reconfigurable hypermedia, which one could cut and paste together at will and produce new hypermedia and new knowledge. Engelbart called the technology that enables this "open hyperdocument system", and showed his own version of it in 1968. Meme Media and Webbles in effect turn the Web into an open hyperdocument system. Pieces of traditional webpages and also Web services can be combined together – which opens up a realm of creative opportunities. The purpose of meme media is to enhance the evolution of knowledge, by allowing "cultural genes" or "memes" to freely cross-fertilize. Yuzuru Tanaka is a still active emeritus professor at the University of Hokkaido, Japan, and the leader of the Knowledge Media Laboratory which he established.

See

• Webble World Portal
• M. Kuwahara and Y. Tanaka: Webbles: Programmable and Customizable Meme Media Objects in a Knowledge Federation Framework Environment on the Web Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Knowledge Federation, CEUR-WS, Vol. 822, Dubrovnik, 2010.

Knowledge Gardening and TopicQuests

Imagine if instead of working each on our own project and article, we would be freely exchanging both questions and solution ideas continuously, as they emerge! Imagine if we all, globally, could in effect think and create together, as if we were sitting in the same room, or (better still) as cells do in a single creative mind!

Knowledge Gardening, developed by Jack Park and his team, builds on Engelbart's core idea called Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Jack Park was an SRI researcher and system developer in artificial intelligence, until he met Engelbart who promptly convinced him that it was the collective intelligence that was the humanity's most urgent need.

See

• Jack Park: Knowledge Gardening as Knowledge Federation. Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Knowledge Federation, CEUR-WS, Vol. 552, Dubrovnik, 2008.
• A technical overview of TopicQuests

Debategraph

Nobody can be as knowledgeable as – all of us together! Debategraph is an online platform that enables people and communities to combine together their knowledge and ideas that are relevant to an issue. With 25000 maps covering a broad variety of topics, and the user community that includes the CNN, the White House, the UK Prime Minister's Office, The Independent, and the Foreign Office among others, Debategraph is clearly changing the way in which issues are debated and understood. Peter Baldwin, a co-founder, was a cabinet minister in several Australian governments, until he got so tired of seeing that the issues were voted on without being understood – that he retired early, bought a home in Australian Highlands, and learned to program the computer... David Price, the other co-founder, has a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in organizational learning and environmental policy, and a similar passion as Baldwin for seeing that the issues are understood. Conveniently, the two men are on two opposite sides of the globe. Debategraph never sleeps!

See

• Debategraph's introduction to itself

Induct Software

Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley observed that innovation can be made incomparably more effective and efficient if it can become "open". Norwegian entrepreneur Alf Martin Johansen heard his talk while visiting Berkeley, and another talk about Web 2.0, and saw that the two ideas can be most naturally combined. Induct Software – the global business venture that he created – has Chesbrough as the head of its advisory board, and the ambition "to interconnect the global innovation ecosystem".

See

• Induct website (make sure to watch the two-minute video)
• See this brief Youtube video where Henry Chesbrough tells the story of Induct's beginning. (Chesbrough is now the leader of Induct's Advisory Board.)

Evangelizing prototypes for knowledge federation

The largest contribution to human knowledge

What is the largest contribution to human knowledge you may imagine?

We asked this question in an evangelizing talk that was given in several occasions at the point where knowledge federation was just beginning to take shape. Our point was to demonstrate that the largest contributions are likely to be the results of changes in social organization of knowledge work. The concrete story here was about the evolution of post-war sociology, during which this field grew about five times in the number of researchers, publications etc; and at the same time divided itself into a number of sociologies that were losing contact with each other – and of course also with the society they were expected to inform. The "largest contribution" observation is here just a generalization of a similar claim that Pierre Bourdieu, a sociology giant, made about his field, at the point where he and some of his colleagues were attempting a re-organization.

See

• "What is knowledge federation?" lecture recording, where the above argument is elaborated during the initial seven minutes
• Collective Mind (Eight vignettes to evangelize a paradigm) lecture slides and audio recording.
• "Knowledge Federation as a Principle of Knowledge Organization and Sharing" article, which begins with an account of the post-war evolution of sociology as a springboard story.

Knowledge work has a flat tire

Academic and media publishing is like trying to speed ahead by pressing the gas pedal, in a car that has a flat tire. The 'car' has a systemic defect, which demands that we attend to it first.

The concrete story, which demonstrates this issue, is about two high-profile scientists bringing contradicting views about the climate change to academic audiences and the media.

We told this vignette as a springboard story at our workshop at Stanford University in 2011, where knowledge federation and systemic innovation were pointed to as an emerging trend.

See

• Knowledge Work Has a Flat Tire

Wiener's paradox

Wiener's paradox is an anomaly in academic knowledge work at large – that published insights may not have any impact on the public opinion and policy; and that further publishing may obscure the essential insights that are the discipline's core gifts to humanity.

The concrete story is about Norbert Wiener's final chapter of 1948 Cybernetics, where two core insights are reported: (1) that we cannot rely on free competition and "the survival of the fittest" to guide us into the future, that systemic insights and thinking and action are necessary; (2) that our society's information or "feedback loop" is broken – and hence that the best insights of our best minds are (as we phrased this) "drowning in an ocean of glut". The paradox is that Wiener committed his own insight to that same broken communication – so that it too, naturally, remained without effect.

The case is in this way made for using our creative powers to recreate the very system by which knowledge is created and shared.

See

• Wiener's Paradox – We Can Dissolve it Together abstract – which was an offer to the International Society for the Systems Sciences, made at the society's 59th yearly conference in 2015 in Berlin, to collaborate with us on co-creating a real-life system, for that community, that would dissolve the paradox. A more concrete prototype and offer was made the subsequent year as The Lighthouse – Innovating the Systems Sciences System, see the abstract.
• Wiener's paradox – we can dissolve it together lecture slides.

Evangelizing prototypes for systemic innovation

We may not lack the resources

In the late 1960s Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the end of the century the science and technology would have advanced so much that we would be able to end "the age of scarcity" and the competition-based society it entails. Did history prove him wrong?

We show why Fuller could have been right by composing a thread of three vignettes, of which the story just mentioned is the last. The thread begins with Charles Ferguson, mathematician - turned political scientist - turned IT entrepreneur – turned Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Ferguson chose to point out (by creating two documentary films) that two recent events – the war in Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis – were caused systemically i.e. by internal dysfunction. By connecting his insight with David McCandles' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram (where issues are represented by rectangles illustrating how much they cost), it is shown that just those two systemically mishandled issues cost the humanity so much that "saving the Amazon" and "Lifting one billion people out of extreme poverty" would cost practically nothing in comparison.

See

• The talk Systemic Innovation Positively, where this thread begins at minute 9.
• The Billion-Dollar-o-Gram 2009

Make a career wish

Imagine you met a fairy... In our presentation at the San Francisco Bay Area Future Salon, we introduced The Game-Changing Game (a method for changing real-world systems) by asking the audience to make an as audacious wish for contribution or achievement as they were able to conceive of. After everyone shared their wishes we showed how even most audacious such wishes may be fulfilled through systemic innovation.

See

• The Game-Changing Game announcement on the Bay Area Future Salon website

A scientific approach to problems

If you wake up with red spots all over our skin, you will not attempt to rub them off or paint them over. Scientific medicine relies on an understanding of anatomy and physiology to treat the underlying (i.e. systemic) causes. Why not treat our societal ills similarly?

See

• Toward a Scientific Understanding and Treatment of Problems report of a workshop talk where an analogy between scientific medicine and contemporary issues is developed.

What happened with all the time we've saved?

Another good place to begin might be by asking – What happened with all the time we've saved since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Everyone appears to be just as busy as ever!

See

• Ode to Self-Organization – Part One, a finctional story about how we got sustainable by discovering the systemic understanding and handling of our realities.

Scientific communication and co-creation

Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015

How to lift academic insights out of a technical jargon of a discipline?

Imagine that a scientist developed a result of very high general interest, and of high potential impact on several fields of science – and wrote an incomprehensible article about it, in the technical jargon of quantum physics. This situation presented itself in reality, and we took advantage of it to develop a complete federation prototype for this type of applications.

The prototype has three natural phases: (1) through collaboration with our communication design team, the article is turned into a multimedia object where the high-level module presents the result in an accessible language of metaphorical diagrams, equipped with recorded interviews with the author to explain the details, and links into the article and the technical details; (2) the second phase placed this result into public awareness, through a high-profile public event and the use of an orchestra of new media; (3) the main ideas are placed online into a Debategraph map, linked with other related ideas, and made available for further elaboration.

By adding "Part One" to the title of the long blog post that explains this project as a technical knowledge federation prototype (see the link below) we created a private joke, which requires explanation. What might the other two parts be (we will probably never write them as blog posts)? They both have to do with the emerging larger paradigm. One of them is about the foundations for truth and meaning. If you recall Heisenberg from Federation through Images, then you are aware of the challenge – our foundation is too narrow... It turns out that there are two ways to broaden it. One of them is what's been pursued here – to create a methodology and social processes etc. The other one is to include the findings of quantum physics into the modeling repertoire of conventional science. This project combines both of them – and in an academically interesting way (...). And now the the other, third part. It's about creativity. Imagine if – because of the mentioned "narrow foundation", we completely misunderstood the nature of creativity. And if we created a research culture, and education, accordingly (...).

See

• Scientific article transformed into a multimedia object – make sure to download the prototype, because the audio recordings cannot be heard in the browser.
• The blog post with detailed description of this project
• Video excerpt from a talk, where this prototype is introduced in an online talk to the Metaversity educational project in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The Paradigm Strategy poster

How can we combine together the core insights of giants in in the humanities – and use them to illuminate our way into the future?

This multimedia document combines a variety of techniques including vignettes, threads, patterns, gestalt and prototypes – with a situated intervention and physical dialog.

The purpose of the Paradigm Strategy poster is to initiate a co-creative dialog with a community of academic systemic thinkers and change makers – by bringing into the conversation the insights of giants, and inviting the audience to develop them further through physical dialog and online interaction.

See

• The Paradigm Strategy poster
• The Paradigm Strategy abstract

The Lighthouse

Imagine that an entire discipline, or academic community, has a message to the world, which just hasn't been grasped yet. Imagine that this message is essential for understanding and applying in practice all other knowledge produced by the community. And most importantly – that this message is exactly what we the people need to hear and digest to embark on the new evolutionary path (replace the reliance on "the invisible hand" by informed or guided evolution of society.

This prototype has been developed for and with the International Society for the Systems Sciences.

See

• Abstract of The Lighthouse – Innovating the Systems Sciences System abstract presented at ISSS60 at the Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
• Abstract of Wiener's paradox – we can dissolve it together presented at ISSS59 Berlin
• Hermes prototype description on Debategraph presented at European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in 2014 in Vienna.

Knowledge Federation and Polyscopy

Knowledge Federation is presented on these pages as "big picture science", and as a prototype of a transdiscipline – i.e. a new paradigm counterpart to the traditional academic discipline. It is a model of the kind of institution that is suitable for developing the knowledge federation praxis academically.

In Federation through Images Polyscopy has been described as "big picture scientific method" – i.e. as a methodology suitable for creating knowledge according to people and society's urgent needs.

Education

Collaborology

What might education need to be to support our transition into the emerging paradigm?

Education is our natural opportunity to recreate the world, with every new generation – and by doing that make our society capable of adapting and evolving. How might education need to be different to truly honor this opportunity? Unlike the MOOCs where information is broadcasted, in Collaborology a range of knowledge resources are co-created or federated by leading international experts; and offered to – and also co-created by – learners worldwide. In this way education becomes not only a way to communicate knowledge, but also to co-create both knowledge and the system by which it federated.

Collaborology manifests the economies of scale that are characteristic of knowledge federation – which enable everyone to contribute to higher organisation and quality of knowledge and knowledge work, instead of merely augmenting the speed and the quantity of production.

See

• Collaborology course flyer
• Article Steps toward a Federated Course Model where core design ideas are described
• [karabeg WAAS rome 2017 Collaborology Abstract Systemic Innovation in Education – the Collaborology Prototype] of our lecture at World Academy's Future Education conference in 2017 in Rome]
• Audio recording and slides of a one-hour introduction to the Collective Mind paradigm – where the first half-hour is "Eight vignettes to evangelize a paradigm", and the second half explains the Collaborology prototype in terms of its design patterns (ways to remedy the anomalies pointed to in the first half, explained by using education as example application).

Leadership and Systemic Innovation

This PhD program has been initiated and developed at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology by Alexander Laszlo, to educate the leaders capable of bringing systemic innovation into actual practice.

See

• The presentation of this program on Debategraph

Doug Engelbart´s Unfinished Revolution – the Program for the Future

This PhD seminar helped us thoroughly research, and present, Doug Engelbart´s core ideas.

"We look into the future of IT research, development and entrepreneurship through the eyes of Doug Engelbart, the famous inventor; we survey and explore his not yet widely understood and implemented ideas. Can information technology help us solve global and other challenges by making human systems ‘collectively intelligent’?"

See

• Course website
• Short explanation how knowledge federation applies the CSE paradigm to knowledge work at large

Information Design

"In the age of the Internet academic communication will not remain restricted to textbooks and research articles. Information design means recreating what we do with information. We have developed a course in which UiO students can learn information design in a flexible way, by following personal needs and interests."

See

• Information Design course flyer – this course was of course transdisciplinary; this flyer was distributed to students across campus
• Article Flexible and Exploratory Learning by PolyscopicTopic Maps describes both the course model and the enabling technology – which was a precursor to what we now call the domain map.

Algorithms and Complexity

The principles of knowledge federation and polyscopy can of course be applied in conventional courses as well – and make an abstract subject accessible to students, and easier to apply in practice.

See

• Pages 130-131 of the article A Case for Polyscopic Structuring of Information, where a summary of the main or generic ideas behind the Algorithms and Complexity prototype is provided.

Movement and Qi

A systemic approach to education cannot be restricted to book knowledge alone. Why not work also with the students' minds and bodies directly?

Included in this prototype is a marketing strategy – showing how to make this type of work accessible to students and academic workers.

See

• Movement and Qi posters

Journalism or public informing

Barcelona 2011 Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism prototype

Journalism, or public informing, constitutes of course the very headlights which today (attempt to) illuminate the world for the majority of people.

In what way should journalism be different to be able to guide our society along the way of systemic and constructive change? What role will the people play in this new information ecosystem? What role is reserved for scientists, or communication designers?

Who will create the new journalism – and in what way?

See

• Engelbart's keynote at Innovation Journalism 4 at Stanford University – where he posits with clarity and precision the challenge to which this project is providing a prototype answer
• Prototype description, An Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism on Debategraph
• Presentation "Recreating Journalism – an Instance of a Paradigm" at the workshop New Media and EU (delivered online) – hear the recording while viewing the Prezi.

Empowering young people to co-create their future

The Game-Changing Game

The Game-Changing Game is a generic method to change real-life systems. There are two categories of 'players' – the Z-players are people in power positions (professors, investors...); they 'play' by empowering the A-players (students, entrepreneurs...) to 'play' their life and career 'games' in a "game-changing way" – that is, by changing the systems of their profession, instead of merely trying to fit in.

See

• Future Salon Q&A
• blog post The Game-Changing Game – A Practical Way to Craft the Future with the link to the EAD article with the same title.
• The blog post Information Age Coming of Age is the history of the creation and presentation (at the Bay Area Future Salon) of The Game-Changing Game, which involves Doug Engelbart, Bill and Roberta English and some other key people from the Engelbart's intimate community.

The Club of Zagreb

The Club of Zagreb is a re-design of The Club of Rome based on The Game-Changing Game. This is essentially a club of Z-players – who decided to make a difference by empowering the A-players, the young ones, to "play their life and career games in a game-changing way".

This prototype is a result of collaboration with several organizations in Croatia: The European Movement Croatia, the eSTUDENT excellence network, and the Zagreb business incubation hub.

In September 2012 (prior to our regular biennial workshop at the Inter University Center Dubrovnik) we gathered in Zagreb to initiate and inaugurate The Club of Zagreb. Mei Lin Fung and Jack Park flew in from California, Yuzuru Tanaka from Japan, David Price from England...

See

• The invitation letter that was sent to participants.

Health and healthcare

Nature Culture Health – Information Design prototype

Already in 1958 Werner Kollath observed that the diseases that were becoming dominant were lifestyle-induced; and that to respond to these new challenges our very approach to healthcare will need to be different. The term he coined and championed – "political hygiene" – is roughly synonymous to knowledge federation.

This prototype and the smaller prototypes that belong to it, all described in the documents linked below, are results of our collaboration with University of Oslo Medical School Professor Gunnar Tellnes and the organization he initiated called Nature Culture Health. At the time of this collaboration Tellnes was also the leader of the European Public Health Association.

See

• This vignette pointing to systemic issues in healthcare by highlighting some of the events in Werner Kollath's life and work
• The prospectus article of our collaboration / project
• Our Abstract Helthcare as a Power Structure (presented at the yearly meating of European Association for History of Medicine and Health) offered a diagnosis ("Can healthcare develop cancer?")
• Abstracts for our workshop and polyscopy presentation at EUPHA's 13th yearly conference in 2005 in Graz
• Our strategy proposal for Nature Culture Health International (which we initiated together) to become an international culture-building project
• Article How to Begin the Next Renaissance - a preliminary version describes the Key Point Dialog as a technique for gestalt change in a community. On p. 11 of the article there is a brief description of of Municipality Dialog or Kommunewiki project in Norway – which worked with public health issues in communities by bringing people in a community into a dialog about lifestyle change
• This brief opening speech at the Sigdal Municipality dialog in April 2008 will tell the whole story in a nutshell.

Tourism, corporation

In the award-winning documentary and book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan described how the corporation, as the most powerful institution on our planet, first acquired the legal rights of a person, and then developed the behavior of a psychopath (Bakan, a professor of Law, did an excellent job federating an essential piece in our puzzle – reflecting the pathological evolution of our systems).

But with a bit of systemic innovation, we can use the power of international corporations to do something good in the world – for example empower good cultural evolution, by empowering good tourism or travel.

Through out the centuries people traveled to get to know other culture, and also themselves. Tourism is of course on the one side a way to economically empower authentic cultures and memes, often on the verge of extinction; and on the other side a medium of inter-cultural exchange, understanding and cross-fertilization. But mass tourism developed as a conveyor-belt shortcut... The key observation here is that the same technology-enabled mechanisms that globalized the modern corporation (the so-called "value chains") can be

UTEA corporation

This prototype was designed to show how business interests, cultural interests and new technology may be combined in a synergistic relationshipo.

See

• UTEA business plan and technology annex (prepared for a venture cup competition)
• Article Memetic Engineering, which describes a general or generic systemic innovation method that this project illustrates ("memes" such as e-business, franchising and value-based marketing are combined to create a new corporation model)

Post-war revitalization

The objects can be rebuilt – but can we bring back to life the culture that once lived there?

Authentic Hercegovina

The real use-case presented itself in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where the war may be seen as an attempt at cultural genocide. The Authentic Hercegovina project was developed as a general prototype or showcase – in collaboration with an international team of architectural revitalization (academic) experts (who rebuilt Mostar after its desctruction).

See

• Authentic Hercegovina project documentation
• Article describing the project and the methodology.

Democracy and governance

Systemic innovation as a form of political action

Already in the 1960s the political scientists knew that the conventional democratic mechanisms such as the elections had little or no impact on policy. Murray Edelman took this insight a step forward – by showing that those mechanisms do have a role – but that this role is symbolic (to legitimize the existing policies, and make the people feel that they were asked...).

We use the keyword symbolic action as roughly an antonym to systemic action or systemic innovation. It is what is needed to give ideas, and people, real power and impact.

See

• Our videotaped greeting Democracy for the 21st Century to Community Boost_r Camp, Sarajevo 2013.

Boundary objects

Imagine systemic innovation / knowledge federation as an emerging profession. It has of course many sides and tasks, as illustrated here – but the core task is to facilitate systemic re-organization in various institutions, professions or generally 'systems', with the help of new technology. This obviously has two domains of work that need to interoperate – the technology people, and the co-creating or re-creating real-life systems. The boundary object are the interface between the two domains. To the designers of real-world systems, they are the basic building blocks, the tool kit. To the technology designers, they are the new 'hammer', 'computer mouse'... basic objects to be created, and design challenges.

A question here is – what is the basic toolkit that is sufficient to create 'good' systems – in particular the ones capable of federating knowledge – what basic tools may be needed? The same question may be asked if we take the evolutionary point of view, and ask what will enable the systems to evolve in a good way, i.e. avoid the pathological evolution that has been part of our theme. We have developed two examples, which illustrate the concept.

Domain map

This boundary object represents a domain of interest, both to the corresponding community of interest (such as a discipline, or a transdiscipline), and to the people outside (journalists, to pick up what is of interest and show further, people from other domains, just people...). To the insiders, this serves (to use Engelbart's keyword) as "dynamic knowledge repository" – it organizes the knowledge, shows the domains where work is needed, orchestrates collaborative work (one person can ask a question and another answer it) etc. To the people outside it presents a high-level view of the domain, so that they may benefit from its results.

Value matrix

This boundary object is a prototype answer to another key question – how to valuate knowledge resources (both people and documents). If we want to support the transition to systems that federate knowledge (and not only article publishing or more generally knowledge broadcasting) then new kinds of contribution need to be recognized and rewarded. The value matrix object can provide what is needed for good system ecology (evolution).

See

• Article Boundary Objects for Online Knowledge Management
• Article Boundary Infrastructures for Conversational Knowledge Federation
• Improvised Knowledge Federation domain map on Debategraph

Design

Communication design

As the above image might illustrate – while our "official culture" (science, legislation, ethical sensibilities...) have been focused on verbal, black-and-white factual messages (i.e. on what polyscopy called "the square"), our culture has been dominated, and in effect created, by commercial interests through judicious use of the cool, the visual and the immediate. A significant part of our mission has been to create a new path for information design – where it will be providing 'the circle' and communicating culturally and scientifically relevant messages.

All communication design here is the result of this collaboration

See

• The research article turned into a multimedia object which was prepared for the Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015 prototype. Download it and experiment (wont't play in the browser). Clicking on the loudspeaker icons in the visual models will open up explanatory interviews with the author.

Foundations for academic design

See

• Our contribution to PhD Design online conference
• At the European Academy of Design conference in 2005 in Bremen we presented a designed (new-paradigm) definition of design – see the article
• The leaders of Danish Designers liked it, and invited us to present it as an opening keynote at their 10th anniversary – see this report

Art

The role of art

When we think about the Renaissance, it's Botticelli's Spring and Venus that first come to mind. In every era, and especially in periods of transition, it was the art that brought out its spirit. Can art play a similar role in the contemporary cultural revival? Can art give a new life and expression to the new ideas that now want to emerge? Can the artist once again be the human laboratory in which a new spirit of the age is being concocted?

Sometimes we think of our project as "academic performance art" – where (all details aside) the highest value is in fostering and manifesting a renewed academic creative spirit. But of course the collaboration with real creative artists gives this a whole new depth and dimension.

Can art federate knowledge? Can it be a catalyst, and an intermediary, between the new spirit that might be born in the world of thought, and the social world with people and their emotions? Can art mobilize us in a revolutionary change? And if it can – what should this art be like?

Earth Sharing prototype

What has just been said about design may be applied to art too. Why not federate art as well? Why not develop a synthesis where art and science are united to move the minds and hearts in a vital and vibrant new direction?

We have just recently begun – with the installation in Kunsthall314 art gallery in Bergen, Norway. This project is the mind child of – and a product of collaboration with – Norwegian artist Vibeke Jentsen (based in Berlin and New York). A proper report is in preparation.

See

• Earth Lab, Bergen report on Vibeke's website.

Rumi in Oslo

The goal of this project, which was sponsored by the Art Council of Norway, was to "express the eternal message of the classical Persian mystical poet Mevlana Jalaludin Rumi in the language of modern arts". Its purpose was "cultural cross-fertilization: between modern arts and oriental spirituality; between modern culture and love-inspired poetry".

See

• The invitation flyer for one of the events.

Community gestalt change

The keyword gestalt points to a central issue in this line of work – the creation of a shared vision in a community, which can lead to a change of direction or orientation.

The Paradigm Strategy poster and dialog

The intention is.... of course... ok, let's wait with this one. It's too large to spell it out in one breath...

See

• Bullet item

The Key Point Dialog

Text

See

• Bullet item

Books and publishing

The book is, we believe, here to stay. It's a great physical thing to put into a backpack and have on a mountain hike, for example. Books invite reflection. We anticipate, however, that the book will no longer be the container of information. So what will be its role – in an overall knowledge ecosystem? And most interesting for us – in what might be the role of the book as medium synergize with other media to facilitate the larger, societal paradigm shift?

Liberation

Text

See

• Bullet item

Systemic Innovation

Text

See

• Part One and Part Two of a recorded lecture

Religion

Definition of religion

Here too it is of interest to define this word, "religion", by convention. So many modern people associate this word with a strong and passionate belief in something, without having any rational ground for this belief. But in traditional societies the religion was what connected each person with his or her own earthly purpose, and the people together into a community or a society. Also etymologically, this word is derived from latin religare whose meaning is "to bind". So why not define religion accordingly?

This has two interesting consequences. The first is that the belief in narrowly conceived self-interest, combined with the belief that "the invisible hand" will turn them into common good, might qualify as modernity's new religion. The second is that – when we liberate ourselves from rigidly held beliefs of any kind (which, as you surely know by now, is precisely what we've undertaken to do) – then we can liberate ourselves not only from traditional religions, but also from this modern one! The reason is that there is something akin to a natural law, which may be modeled perhaps even as a collection of causal principles, that underlies the phenomenon of religion.

The Garden of Liberation prototype

This point to a most interesting and valuable piece in the puzzle of the emerging pattern: When we begin to properly federate knowledge about the matters that matter, that we may end up binding ourselves to our life's purpose, and to each other in a society, in an entirely different way than we presently do. This is really good news – because, as you may have noticed, the religion of selfishness will not easily lead us to the kind of changes that we have been talking about.

The Garden of Liberation prototype has as its goal to set some of these processes into motion, by federating the core insight of the Buddha – as it was interpreted by Thailand's enlightened monk Buddhadasa. The first book in Knowledge Federation trilogy, titled "Liberation" and subtitled "Religion for the Third Millennium" is a piece and an intervention in that prototype.

See

• The Garden of Liberation blog post tells the story behind The Garden of Liberation prototype
• Science and Religion blog post outlines some of the the scientific and phenomenological background for this project.
• The Introduction to Liberation presents also a brief summary of this book.

Methodology

All this is methodology

From an academic or fundamental point of view, this website is a proposal for a new paradigm in knowledge work, and in particular a new academic paradigm – and an intervention to help the emergence of this new paradigm and the corresponding larger societal paradigm. So all of this is methodology, including the very idea to propose a paradigm and a methodology, to begin with.

See

• The blog post Design Epistemology and the research article that is introduced and linked there. The point that interests us the most here is the possibility to liberate our creativity – and then redirect it to socially urgent or necessary purposes. This possibility is introduced by analogy with the explosion of creativity that marked the development of modern art. In this analogy the methodologies may correspond to styles such as impressionism, cubism and others.

Polyscopy

Polyscopy has been designed as a prototype methodology. Here are some references for illustration, and a couple of examples of real-life early applications.

See

• The abstract of our contribution Role of Ideograms in Polyscopic Modeling, which was presented at the International Visual Sociology Association's conference in Antwerp in 1999 was our first intervention of this kind. The question asked by the organizers was "If visual techniques are introduced into science – does science become any larger?" – and they invited contributions from across disciplines. We showed, by describing a combination of methodology development and ideograms, how new kinds of results mayh be developed in traditionally "soft" sciences like sociology, and presented visually. This was also our first Quixotte stunt – see the three vignettes starting from this one] in Ode to Self-Organization – Part Two.
• Our Abstract Helthcare as a Power Structure (presented at the yearly meating of European Association for History of Medicine and Health) offered a diagnosis ("Can healthcare develop cancer?") – and at the same time offered a methodological contribution to this field (polyscopy as a way to step beyond historiography and develop "law of change" type of results)
• Further examples of application are provided under "Concept definition" below.

Concept definitions

The last - but not in the least the least – of our application is a seemingly exotic collection of definitions – which may alone be sufficient to make a case for the new paradigm in knowledge work (as a natural and necessary first step toward the larger paradigm change).

The rationale is as follows: In the traditional order of things, all things – ranging from basic institutions to basic concepts in the language – are what they are. A traditional definition then attempts to reconcile what contemporary people and the people historically have associated with the concept, How can anything (culture, democracy, science...) – when defined in this way – be adapted to its purpose? If you'll allow us to jump to a conclusion – the definition by convention making is to the new paradigm as the definition by tradition is to the old one.

We present a small collection of examples that can illustrate what this may mean in actual practice – and what difference it may make.

Design

See

• At the European Academy of Design conference in 2005 in Bremen we presented a designed (new-paradigm) definition of design – see the article
• The leaders of Danish Designers liked it, and invited us to present it as an opening keynote at their 10th anniversary – see this report
• See the blog post An Academic Foundation for Design and Design as an Academic Foundation and follow the links.

Visual literacy

The International Visual Literacy movement is indeed, just as design, an essential piece in the puzzle of the emerging paradigm.

See

• Article Perspective of Visual Literacy, which both introduces the definition of visual literacy and a new way of defining concepts (so that the essence is captured, not the details).
• Lida Cochran – the only (then) surviving of the four people who started this visionary movement and community, liked the idea – see her letter

Addiction

While our legislation and our ethical sensibilities are tuned to traditional addictions such as gambling and drugs, thousands of new ones may be created by new technologies. How can we create the word 'addiction' as a way of looking at things, and be able to perceive and identify whole new addictions?

See

• Article Addiction Pattern

Power structure

This completely central keyword federates some of the most basic insights across a spectrum of fields (ranging from combinatorial optimization and artificial intelligence to cognitive science and psychology), to pinpoint a negative trend in our societal and cultural evolution. A salient characteristic of this prototype is that it (just as the one just mentioned) involves polyscopy in an essential way. A power structure is an aspect of things, not a thing itself. And yet we must be able to take care of this aspect ('crack') if our society / culture ('cup') is to be whole...

See

• Article Information for Conscious Choice, where the power structure concept was initially published (invited by IDJ's main editor, upon presentation at InfoDesign2000 conference)
• Chapter 4 of the book manuscript Informing Must Be Designed (use the password Dubrovnik to open it) describes this concept in detail – and uses it as part of the argument to (once again) make the need for the new paradigm transparent

Culture

Another textbook example. Bauman's book "Culture as Praxis" is in essence a survey of about very many historical definitions of culture, with the conclusion "we don't really know what culture means". Not a good start if we should indeed develop culture as praxis (i.e. as an informed practice). But the point is more general – the traditional way of defining things (when we try to reconcile the stated definitions and say what the concept "really means") no longer work in practice. We need to be able to define concepts by convention – in order to give our institution a (clear, agile, new...) purpose and direction, and then be able to adapt them to the chosen purpose/direction through systemic innovation.

What is really "culture" (or "consciousness" or "god" or ...)? In the book manuscript Informing Must Be Designed the definition "by design" or "by convention" is introduced as a sword that can cut the Gordian knot of so many traditional dilemmas and ill-posed questions.

See

• Chapter 2 of Informing Must Be Designed.