#15 How different am I, making clock number 15, from the process of natural selection laboring under changing conditions to generate the biological constructs? That ancient evolutionary system works on the basis of trial and error repeated in huge numbers over immense spans of time, with the failures discarded and the successes retained. At times it seems to me that my clock making is quite similar, as my mind, just barely thinking, sorts through huge numbers of possibilities and discards them as failures before even trying them, so the few that are made have a pretty good chance of success. Is this foresight some form of understanding? I think not. No revelation here, just enough thinking to spur the maker on to cut some piece of metal which, once made, might fail or succeed. Yet — in either case — the thing made and its creation remains the sole root of any real understanding that takes place. The clock is crude but gets built, and even in its base simplicity teaches its maker how to understand what must be understood for something to be made. — Richard Benson Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding chance
A constant dialogue Have you ever seen Gerhard Richter painting? It is phenomenal to watch. He might start one of his large, abstract paintings by carefully applying oil paint to the canvas with a thick brush. Then, he begins to scrape, smear, or add new layers of paint with a large, home-made squeegee. After each change, Richter pauses, takes a step back, and looks at the result: What did just happen with the picture? What composition has come about? Where have interesting parts emerged? What is the next move that might bring the piece one step closer to completion? And which action would be a mistake? There is a lot of intention and carefulness in this process, yet Richter equally respects the results of accident and chance. He lets go of a certain kind of control to let things happen that are surprising and exciting. But at the same time, Richter always exerts enough control to influence the result. He decides what to keep and what to destroy. It is the ultimate creative process: a constant dialogue. Matthias Ott, Painting With the Web matthiasott.com chance
The gods who live beneath names Sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities connectionchance
Possible lives Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates, or brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness. Alain de Botton, On Love melancholychance
In Defense of Browsing An Essay by Leanne Shapton www.curbed.com The feeling of fortuitous gratitude at coming across unexpected information is something most of us who’ve done any research, have experienced — that kismet of finding the perfect book, one spine away from the one that was sought. In the field of art and image research, this sparking of transmission, of sequence and connection, happens on a subconscious level. …Why is the vernacular image still being dismissed as ephemera? Why is its study not being prioritized? All languages are alive, but visual language is galactic. Keywords are not eyeballs, and creating rutted pathways to follow is the antithesis of study. A century of visual language, knowledge, and connectivity is marching toward a narrow, parsimonious basement of nomenclature. The NYPL takes a step backward if it models its shelves and research on a search engine. Spontaneity is learning. Browsing is research. The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking forMarginalia Search connectionresearchlanguageserendipitychance
Stepping stones in possibility space An Article by Gordon Brander subconscious.substack.com If we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new. Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting. ...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting! chanceknowledgeprogressnoveltyevolutioninvention
A few things that could be poetry An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels notebook.wesleyac.com The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection An idea, if you consider it divine enough poetrychancewordseuphony
The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for An Article by Austin Kleon austinkleon.com In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.” / There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.” / If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for. In Defense of BrowsingMarginalia Search chancediscovery
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
Micromorts A Definition by Matt Webb interconnected.org There’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example: skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump running a marathon: 26 micromorts 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day. deathchance
Chance favors the prepared mind A Quote by Louis Pasteur The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to LearnPreparing for problems creativitychance
What's Wrong With This Model? A Chapter from The Design of Design by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. What's wrong with the rational modelDeciding what to designEvaluating goodnessChanging constraintsThey just don't work that way+1 More
What's wrong with the rational model We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing The Constraints Keep Changing Changing constraintsDeciding what to designThe situation talks back
Deciding what to design We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design. I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted. Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process. What's wrong with the rational model iteration
Evaluating goodness The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Rational Model assumes that design involves a search of the decision tree, and that at every node, one can evaluate the goodness function of several downward branches. In fact, one cannot in general do this without exploring all the downward branches to all their leaves, which is possible in principle, but leads to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives in practice. What's wrong with the rational model
Changing constraints The Constraints Keep Changing The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?” What's wrong with the rational model constraints
They just don't work that way Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Rational Model, although perhaps the hardest to prove, is that most experienced designers just don’t work that way. “Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior.” — Nigel Cross
We must outgrow it Why all this fuss about the process model? Does the model we and others use to think about our design process really affect our designing itself? I believe it does. I believe our inadequate model and following it slavishly lead to fat, cumbersome, over-features products and also to schedule, budget, and performance disasters. The Rational Model, in any of its forms, leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework. The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.