Prospecting a creative frontier

A case for liberating academic creativity

Imagine an academic culture where the researchers are empowered to let their creativity soar, and come up with any idea or course of action that can make a difference. Or in other words, imagine a university where the research is not guided by the "publish or perish" ecology (which is so glaringly Industrial Age-like, isn't it?) – but by the design epistemology. What sort of work, and what ideas might result?

Prototyping the socio-technical lightbulb

From our portfolio of applications we select and show a representative sample. Our intention is not to survey or to inform, but to illustrate.

While illustrating a creative frontier (or technically a paradigm) by showing a broad variety of creative acts that it may foster, we also emphasize its coherence and unity. We must leave it to you, the reader, to discover how all our applications really point to just one single insight – the astonishingly large difference that can be made when we apply our creative powers in a systemic way, instead of just imitating the past. Another challenge to you is to see how the varius design ideas synergize with one another and form a harmonious whole – an academic paradigm to begin with, and then also a larger societal one.

We begin by presenting the more practical applications, and end with the most academic ones.

Next-generation inventions

The last century gave us the airplane, the washing machine and the computer. We predict that the inventions that will characterize this century will be of the socio-technical kind. We will invent new ways to educate people, better ways to implement a democracy, and new approaches to ethics and religion. What might they be like? Perhaps already these work-in-progress prototype may point to possibilities and stimulate interest.

These applications are prototypes

Prototypes are a knowledge federation technique

Think about our core challenge – to bring relevant and transformative ideas from a multiplicity of fields together, and have them bear upon institutional and other systemic solutions, in real-life practice. How can this be achieved?

The prototypes are innovative systemic solutions implemented in practice, and strategically embedded in practice, aiming to change it.

By putting the prototype in charge of a transdisciplinary community (which we call a transdiscipline) to create it and update it continuously, we secure that the state of the art knowledge from relevant fields has a way to impact the design of the prototype, and vice-versa – that the challenges encountered in this design have a way of becoming challenges to pertinent academic and other creative communities.

In the paradigm we are presenting, the prototypes play the role of (1) models (because they embody design ideas and solutions in a way that makes them easy to adapt to other creative tasks and situations), (2) interventions (into real-life systems and situations) and (3) experiments (because they allow us to see what works and what needs to be improved).

The prototypes together form a single overarching prototype, the knowledge federation – for which the Knowledge Federation is the prototype transdiscipline.

Evangelizing prototypes for systemic innovation

We may not lack the resources

In the 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 put an end to "the age of scarcity" and all the competition it entails. Did history prove him wrong?

We show why Fuller may have been right – and that our key issue is that our systems waste resources – by composing a thread of three vignettes, of which the one just mentioned is the last.

The thread begins with a vignette about 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 by internal or systemic defects. By connecting his insight with David McCandles' Billion-Dollar-o-Gram (which visually displays the costs of global issues), it is shown that cost of the two issues Ferguson pointed to was so high, that "saving the Amazon" and "Lifting one billion people out of extreme poverty" would cost practically nothing in comparison.

See

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

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 that 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

• This blog post, which is a fictional story about how we got sustainable by discovering the systemic understanding and handling of our realities. This story was written just before Knowledge Federation would begin to self-organize as a transdiscipline.

Evangelizing prototypes for knowledge federation

The largest contribution to 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 show that the contributions to knowledge that are changes of 'the algorithm' or 'the mechanism' i.e. the changes of the social organization of knowledge work can be incomparably larger than the contributions of knowledge itself.

The vignette that brings this opportunity down to earth is about the evolution of post-war sociology, during which this field grew about five times in the number of researchers and publications. In the course of which the sociology divided itself into a number of factions that were losing contact with each other – and with the society whose malfunctions sociology is expected to reveal. The "largest contribution" observation is just a generalization of the claim made by Pierre Bourdieu about sociology – at the point where he and his overseas colleague James Coleman were attempting reorganization.

See

• "What is knowledge federation?" recording of our evangelizing talk at Trinity College Dublin, where the above argument is elaborated during the initial seven minutes
• "Knowledge Federation as a Principle of Knowledge Organization and Sharing" article in the proceedings of the first Knowledge Federation workshop, where the case for knowledge federation is made by first telling about 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. Our knowledge work has a structural or systemic defect, which must be attended to 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. Consider this story as a metaphor: First Lord Robert May of Oxford comes to us, with all imaginable academic credentials and accompanied by our Minister of Science and Education, to tell us that the academic consensus on the climate change has been reached; and that the question is no longer whether it's human-caused and what needs to be done, but whether we'll be able to mobilize the public, and the political leadership, to do what is obviously and urgently necessary. Then just a couple of months later we are visited by our Nobel Laureate physicist Ivan Gjaever, who tells us – and the media – that the whole climate change story is just nonsense; that the climate has never been more stable. The point is – isn't it – the only way the media can deal with the complex world is to give a voice to everyone, and let the public decide who's right; and that the public can't decide who's right, and that our knowledge work needs to be differently organized – if we are to be collectively able to see the road ahead and follow it.

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

See

• Knowledge Work Has a Flat Tire

Collective intelligence in practice

Debategraph

None of us can be as knowledgeable as all of us together!

Debategraph is an online platform that enables people and communities to combine together the knowledge and ideas that are relevant to an issue. And based on them, to create guiding insights and reach conclusions. With 25000 maps covering a broad variety of topics including some of our society's most urgent and most interesting ones, 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 successfully changing the way in which core issues are debated and understood.

Peter Baldwin, Debategraph's co-founder, was a cabinet minister in a couple of Australian governments, until he got so tired of seeing the issues voted on without being understood – that he retired early, bought himself a home in Australian Highlands, and learned how to program the computer... David Price, the other co-founder, has a doctorate in organizational learning and environmental policy from the University of Cambridge, and a similar passion as Baldwin for making knowledge count. Conveniently, the two men are on two opposite sides of the globe. Debategraph never sleeps!

See

• Debategraph's introduction to itself

Induct Software

Imagine a collectively intelligent business; or even better – an ecosystem where the business and its clients and suppliers are all linked together, and can freely co-create improvements and solutions.

Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley observed that innovation can be made incomparably more effective and efficient if it can be made "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 naturally combined. Induct Software, the global business venture 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)
• This Youtube video where Chesbrough tells the story of Induct's beginning.

Enhancing the evolution of knowledge

Meme Media and Webbles

Imagine if knowledge were not locked up in traditional documents – but made available in reconfigurable hypermedia, which one could cut and paste at will and produce new hypermedia and new knowledge.

Engelbart called the enabling technology "open hyperdocument system", and demoed a version of it in 1968. Meme Media and Webbles in effect turn the Web into an open hyperdocument system. Both hypermedia content and web services can be combined together – which opens a realm of opportunities for creating smart documents. The higher purpose of meme media is to enhance the evolution of knowledge by allowing "cultural genes" or "memes" to cross-fertilize.

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 each of us working on our own project and article, we would be freely exchanging both questions and solution ideas continuously, as they emerge! Imagine if we could in effect think and create together, on a global scale, as if we were sitting in the same room. Or as if we were cells in a single creative mind!

Knowledge Gardening, developed by Jack Park and his team, builds on Engelbart's core notion of Dynamic Knowledge Repository.

Park was an SRI researcher and system developer in artificial intelligence, until he met Engelbart, who promptly convinced him that the collective intelligence was our 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

Empowering the young to co-create their future

The Game-Changing Game

Imagine you met a fairy... In our presentation at the San Francisco Bay Area Future Salon, we introduced The Game-Changing Game 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 such wishes may be made true through systemic innovation.

The Game-Changing Game is a generic method for recreating and changing real-life socio-technical systems. There are two categories of 'players'. The Z-players are self-selected from among the 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 – by changing rather than only learning and adopting their professions.

See

• Future Salon Q&A
• Blog post The Game-Changing Game – A Practical Way to Craft the Future with the link to the published 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 features Doug Engelbart and some of his closest friends and collaborators such as Bill and Roberta English and Mei Lin Fung.

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 Knowledge Federation's collaboration with two student excellence networks in Croatia: the eSTUDENT and the Creativity Centerexcellence network; And with The European Movement Croatia 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 (the founder of The Program for the Future – Silicon Valley-based initiative to continue and complete "Engelbart's unfinished revolution") and Jack Park flew in from California, Yuzuru Tanaka from Japan, David Price from England...

See

• The invitation letter to the opening of The Club of Zagreb.

Education for an evolving society

Collaborology

What will education need to be like to support us in the transition to the next paradigm?

Education, even when it does not intend that, recreates the world with every new generation. But our present education is conceived to recreate the same world. Not only because of the age-old disciplinary content it delivers, but also by its traditional delivery where education that is received at a young age is expected to last a lifetime. Naturally the people will resist change – unless they too are empowered to change as well, by re-educating themselves accordingly.

Unlike the MOOCs, where information is broadcasted, in Collaborology a range of knowledge resources are co-created or federated through collaboration of leading international experts and students. In a knowledge-work ecosystem that results, the students play the role of bacteria in the most positive sense of this word – by composting the dead bodies of knowledge and extracting vital nutrients to be reused for a new purpose. Collaborology in this way also provides a practical way in which a new body of knowledge (media-enabled collaboration) can be created and disseminated (or in a word federated). The economies of scale (where a single expert creates only a single module or lecture for global use) enable the use of immersive and other new technologies in education. Also these economies of scale 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
• Steps toward a Federated Course Model article where Collaborology's design patterns are described
• Systemic Innovation in Education – the Collaborology Prototype abstract of our presentation of Collaborology at World Academy's Future Education conference in 2017 in Rome (Transition to a New Paradigm in Education section)
• 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).

Domain Maps

If we should empower our students to choose what they want to learn freely, in accordance with their background and future plans – in what way shall we provide them guidance? In what way will the curriculum, and the exam, be organized?

Our prototype answer involves a new technology called domain maps (which at an earlier stage of development we called Polyscopic Topic Maps)

See

• Course flyer for the transdisciplinary University of Oslo course called Information Design, precursor to Collaborology, where this methodology was developed and applied and tested in actual practice.
• Article Flexible and Exploratory Learning by PolyscopicTopic Maps describes both the course model and the enabling technology.
• Article Boundary Objects for Online Knowledge Management
• Improvised Knowledge Federation domain map on Debategraph

Leadership and Systemic Innovation

"Many regions and economies have attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to transplant Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture. The anecdote we are about to share will show that something much larger may actually be possible and even easy – something the Silicon Valley was unable to achieve, owing to the idiosyncrasies of its culture." With these words we began our inauguration keynote – which (as you might have guessed) built upon the Incredible History of Doug vignette told in Federation through Stories.

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

• Recording of a brief variant of the Doug Engelbart springboard story presented to the 2018 generation of students
• Recording of a brief lecture that continues the above one by explaining the essence of Engelbart's vision and contributions.
• The presentation of this program on Debategraph

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

"Can information technology help us solve global and other challenges by making human systems ‘collectively intelligent’?" Te stated objective of this PhD seminar was to point to an emerging frontier in computer science and IT innovation, by elaborating on Douglas Engelbart's vision and ideas.

The development of this seminar helped us thoroughly research and make acccessible Doug Engelbart´s core ideas.

See

The recording of the final lecture of this seminar, where it is explained how snuggly Engelbart's vision and the emerging creative frontier fit in as the next step in the development of computer science and engineering.
• Course website

Movement and Qi

If you'll now recall Aurelio Peccei's prognosis – that our future will have to be a "an inspired product" of a cultural revival – then the challenge is open for making education more than just the mental know-how. In what way can we incorporate the work with the students' minds and bodies into the academic scheme of things?

Polyscopy comes to our rescue. The designed concept "movement" includes anything that is done with the body such as meditation and yoga. The designed concept "qi" – while resembling the corresponding oriental one – is really just a way to model and communicate the reported effects that the movement may have.

Included in this prototype is a marketing strategy – an experiment in making this type of work accessible and attractive to students and academic workers.

See

• Movement and Qi posters were used in this strategy by pairing them randomly and exposing on strategic spots on the campus.

Journalism for an informed society

Barcelona 2011 Innovation Ecosystem for Good Journalism

Journalism, or public informing, constitutes the very headlights which today illuminate the world for the majority of people. What should journalism be like to show the people the real or systemic causes to their problems? And to empower them to direct their action accordingly? It is clear that the journalists alone cannot produce the needed information, and that the academic domain experts, and also the citizens, need to be part of the news production. In what way will all those groups collaborate? What technologies might enable such collaboration?

A related challenge was the question who might be capable of producing a model of such journalism – and in what way? Our 2011 workshop in Barcelona, where this prototype was created, was an opportunity to showcase and put to test the basic knowledge federation approach, where a transdisciplinary community is formed to create and update a prototype. We asked Paddy Coulter – who embodies good journalism – to be the director of the project. David Price of Debategraph and Global Sensemaking was the leader of the "techies" team. Mei Lin Fung (who in 2008 initiated The Program for the Future to complete Engelbart's work) represented the Engelbartian point of view. A team of local journalist and journalism inovators, who were the creators of the Wikidiario citizenship journalism project, and Ramon Sangüesa, an academic collective intelligence expert, were our local hosts.

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.

Science to the people

Tesla and the Nature of Creativity 2015

How to lift a key academic insight 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.

In addition to being a prototype in academic communication, this is also a prototype for scientific – and social – creation of truth and meaning. There are two natural ways to broaden the "narrow frame of concepts" that Heisenberg warned us about six decades ago (see Federation through Stories). 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 (...).

No less important is, of course, the title theme of this project – 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 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, which was the first of its three modules. The second module was our communication design team – whose task was to transform the insights of the scientists into messages communicable to general public. The third module in the initial prototype, whose role was to place the created material into actual politics and policy, was Norway's Green Party.

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, the predecessor of The Lighthouse, proposed at European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in 2014 in Vienna.

THE PS POSTER

Value matrix object

How can we empower the academic knowledge workers to step beyond he conventional peer-review scheme of things – and contribute in a variety of ways? In what way can we keep record of and honor such contributions? How can we create an academic ecology that is conducive to the emerging paradigm?

Our prototype answer is the value matrix object – a piece of technology associated with each knowledge resource (this includes both documents and people), whose task is to accumulate all information that may be of use for evaluating the value of the resource. This technology is a "matrix" because it stores value information with respect to a multiplicity of criteria, and multiple ways of assessing value.

See

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

Art can again make a difference

Art for the next renaissance

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?

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).

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.

Caring for health

Nature Culture Health – Information Design prototype

Maintenance is so much more effective and so less costly than repair; why isn't our healthcare informed by this simple insight?

A related issue is that we've abandoned the creation of our lifestyle, and of basic culture, to commercial forces.

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 – whose goal was to work with public health by taking advantage of the toolkit that the nature and the culture could provide. Tellnes was at the time of this collaboration also leading 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
• 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.

Travel again becomes authentic

UTEA franchise

Since the beginning of time people traveled to become acquainted with other cultures, and on a deeper level with themselves. And on the supply side, tourism presents a way for world's endangered cultural species to stay alive. But mass tourism's superior economies of scale threaten to reverse that. Can systemic innovation intervene in this domain and make a difference?

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. This may be legal – but is it legitimate? (Bakan, a law professor, was in this notable way federating a key insight from his profession).

Could there be a way to do a kind of a Judo trick on the power of corporations – and apply it toward sustaining those who are both culturally and economically endangered?

This line of our work was developed in collaboration with Karina Fürst and her company Authenticore, which developed a successful practice of authentic travel.

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)

Authentic Hercegovina

The recent war in Bosnia-Hercegovina may be seen as an attempt at cultural genocide. The architectural heritage has largely been rebuilt – but can we rebuild the culture?

The Authentic Hercegovina project was developed in collaboration with Professor Pasic Amir and his international team of architectural revitalization experts.

See

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

Democracy and governance

Systemic innovation as a form of political action

"Our theme now is the science behind democracy. We might also call it the science of sustainability. There are some facts, some proper academic results, which tend to be ignored even today, even though some of them are already fifty years old." This is how we began the brief talk that introduces this theme at the Leadership and Systemic Innovation doctoral program in Buenos Aires shared below. The point made is of course what we've been talking about all along – namely that the ability to choose our future crucially depends upon our ability to see and evolve our systems or institutions.

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.

While the Knowledge Federation has not yet made prototypes that explicitly handle governance and democracy, we submit knowledge federation and systemic innovation as corresponding respectively to what the cyberneticians called "feedback" and "control" – two capabilities that an enlightened or informed or real democracy will obviously need to possess.

See

• Recording of Democracy 2.0/, the mentioned 15-minute lecture given in Argentina, which points to the vital link between democracy and systemic innovation. It may be worth mentioning that the entire argument is not based on the headlights of the metaphorical bus, but on its brakes. The story told is part of the second book in the Knowledge Federation Trilogy, titled "Systemic Innovation" and subtitled "Democracy for the Third Millennium".
• Our videotaped greeting Democracy for the 21st Century to Community Boost_r Camp, Sarajevo 2013.

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.

Giving research a purpose

As the things are now, research fields are what the researchers in them are doing. The way of defining concepts by design that is, by making conventions, enables us to define research fields by pointing to the role or roles they may have in a world where purpose, rather than habit, is the guiding principle; and where systemic re-organization to adjust to a purpose is the way institutions evolve.

The following two examples will illustrate this idea.

Design

What is really design as an academic field? What body of knowledge should it be based on? The departure point of this work was our contribution to an online conference of the PhD Design community, whose task was to answer those and similar questions. Since we are talking about the philosophy doctorate, the community's leaders thought, then philosophy should be the answer. We replied that the classical philosophy as a foundation has problems. But that we can design the foundation for design... Our proposal was, of course, a variant of the design epistemology. Design, redefined, becomes a core element of society's "guided evolution".

The design community liked our answer presented at European Academy of Design's conference in Bremen, and our presentation was selected to be repeated as an opening keynote on the 10th anniversary of the Dannish Designers organization.

See

• Our contribution to the PhD Design online conference
• Our article presented at the European Academy of Design conference in 2005 in Bremen
• Danish Designers conference report
• Blog post An Academic Foundation for Design and Design as an Academic Foundation

Visual literacy

As the above image might illustrate – while our "official culture" (science, legislation, ethics...) has been focused on verbal, black-and-white factual messages (or on what polyscopy calls "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 ("the circle").

At the point where the International Visual Literacy Association was searching for a good definition for their subject of study, we contributed a generic way to make such definitions so that they point to the core purpose that needs to be served (instead of trying to pinpoint what visual literacy "really is").

Once again the community's elders found our proposal useful.

See

• Article Perspective of Visual Literacy article with our proposal
• Email from Lida Cochran (then the only still living IVLA co-founder) welcoming our proposal

Everyday concept definitions

Power structure

While our political and ethical sensibilities have been tuned to dictators, bankers, political parties, terrorists and other traditional power holder – a whole new way of conceiving of this issue can be legitimized by combining the insights of giants.

A consequence of power structure, this designed way of identifying our political enemies, is that the enemy is none else but – ourselves! The power structure is simply a devolutionary tendency of our systems, which turn us – without our awareness or intention – into our own enemies.

This important 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. Its salient characteristic is that it (just as we saw above) points not to a thing but to an aspect of things

The theme here is in what way exactly our societal systems, and with them our society itself, are evolving? We'll come back to this central theme in Federation through Conversations.

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
• Our Abstract Helthcare as a Power Structure presented at the yearly meeting of European Association for History of Medicine and Health) where the power structure concept has been applied.

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 with the help of technology.

This problem can be overcome if no longer reify addiction as specific things or activities, but define it as a pattern.

See

• Article Addiction Pattern

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.