Quotes

"Dialogue is mutual search for a new reality, not debate to win with stronger arguments. In a dialogue propositions are pointers toward a common new reality; not against each other to win a verbal battle, but complementing each other in an effort to accommodate legitimate goals of all parties, inspired by theories and values, and constructive-creative-concrete enough to become a causa finalis". Galtuung


"I use the concept of affect as away of talking about a margin of manouverability, the 'where we might be able to go' and 'what we might be able to do' in every present situation. I guess 'affect' is a word I use for 'hope': Massumi


"A discourse is a system of words, actions, rules, beliefs, and institutions that share common values. Particular discourses sustain particular worldviews. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action. Discourses tend to be invisible--taken for granted as part of the fabric of reality."Fairclough


Emergence is “the principle that entities exhibit properties which are meaningful only when attributed to the whole, not to its parts.” Checkland


"What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible)." Norman




Tuesday 25 October 2011

Studying Emergence

Our restatement of Steven Johnson's "five fundamental principles" (pp 77-79) as tips for modelling self-organising systems are:
  • More examples are better: Studying a few ants will never lead to an understanding of the global behaviour of the colony.
  • Low-level ignorance is useful: Lose a few ants and it doesn't make much difference.
  • Notice how the system responds to random encounters: Individual ants will stumble across a new resource which increases the adaptiveness of the whole (and reduces the possibility of getting stuck on a 'false peak').
  • Notice the patterns in the signs: Ants respond the the frequency of ant encounters and the gradient of pheromone trails, not to messages from individual ants.
  • Components pay most attention to their neighbours: In this way swarm logic leads to global wisdom.
Johnson's other "four core principles" are "neighbour interaction, pattern recognition, feedback, and indirect control."  (p. 22)


http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/194/1/What-is-Emergence/Page1.html




It should be noted that some of the language could be interpreted to  evoke the scientific "gaze"
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