Tuesday 3 February 2009

The Butterfly Effect.

I've blogged about 'abductive reasoning' a couple of times before. This is a sort of action focussed speculative analysis, reasoning what might be, and is a common trait in designers.

After group heckling the atrocious film 'The Butterfly Effect' during the Emerge event in York last week, my mind has been full of time travel ideas, and I started wondering how abductive reasoning might be applied at the end of a research project, in a giant 'What if?' exercise. At the start of Open Habitat, I spent a lot of time applying abductive reasoning to the construction of project scenarios. Now that we have the benefit of experience behind us, what might we have done differently, and how catastrophically good or bad might that have been for the project? If we travel back in time to key points in the Open Habitat project, and imagine that we had made a different choice, where might we be now?

2 comments:

Henry Berry said...

Ian
1 I miss you.
2 A blog as fascinating (almost) as you
3 abductive reasoning: the best example I've seen was when I texted out to everyone I know and respect something like "what should guide me?" You responded with "imagine the ideal and act accordingly".
4 bisociation has a play in your thoughts about reasoning. The creative act is more about what's not happening. Censoring, for a start.
5 blogging may be the last refuge of the creative spirit in times unwilling to fund it.
6 I miss you some more
HB

Ian Truelove : Cubist Scarborough said...

Henry,
1 You can't miss me now you've found my blog.
2 You need to sign up to Twitter. 140 character micro blogging focuses the creative spirit.
3 @henryberry has already nicked your Twitter name. He's an antiquarian book dealer from Connecticut and has 0 followers.