Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 142! Creativity: Continuing After Causality...
Good morning emergent co-ordinations of potentials under perilous circumstances,
It is already the end of May! In the Japanese calendar of “micro seasons” we are at the end of the period of the “Lesser Ripening” (one of twenty-four periods) and in the phase of “What ripens and is harvested” (one of seventy-two phases). Here, our roses are all in bloom and the bees are hovering over everything. Our “harvesting” is foraging; first it was the spring onions, then knotweed, morels, and dandelions; soon it will be time for the docks and lambsquarters.
In our ecosystem, now that the spring semester is really behind us (along with our brief reprieve in the mountains and painting), we now find ourselves in full swing of summer endeavors.
For us, it's going to be a busy summer -- but before getting into all of this, we need to take a step back and mention, that a few weeks ago, amid mountain scrambling and kitchen painting, Jason was nominated as one of New Jersey's Innovators to Watch in New Jersey's Innovate 100 . If you've been reading this newsletter for more than a week, you know that I (Jason) do not feel this is an individual award by any means, but that this is an Emergent Futures Lab extended ecosystem award because none of us exist unto ourselves and we do little, especially in regards to innovation, without our extended ecosystem of others (from people, to practices to things and environments). So - a quick pat on all our own backs (even if we don’t all have backs)!
Now - onward to some interesting developments in our busy already-in-progress summer:
One of the many hats we wear is as co-directors of the MIX Lab (MIX is short for Making and Innovating for X – “x” being the unknowable, not-yet existent potential) at Montclair State University. The lab is a center for research, teaching, and community support of creativity and innovation in all of its possibilities. Our lab has many diverse experimental attributes and programs, one of which is the ability to do things in a very enactive/embodied hands-on manner. To this end, we have all sorts of equipment and facilities for making. This ranges from sewing machines to 3D printers. And this summer, we are in the midst of a major upgrade to the MIX Lab. We are replacing 40 of our eight year old 3D printers with 22 new 3D printers.
Yes, far less. But qualitatively more—absolutely.
The advances in 3D printing technology over the last few years are such that we can produce more prints in less time with half the machines and, most importantly, finally turn out highly experimental and highly functional objects. The material properties and advances in quality are so significant over the old printers we've been using that this marks a watershed moment for us.
And it has us going back to the drawing board—rethinking significant parts of our curriculum, student outcomes, and innovation potential for our students and the larger community we collaborate with. It's a very exciting moment that is more than just about this 3D printing technology. Our working globally with communities, organizations, and businesses on a huge variety of projects over the last few years has taught us so much, and this summer we are setting aside considerable time to bring this back into our lab and innovation curriculum. For us, it is clear that the way education is operating is no longer viable to meet the pressing demands of the future. Things really need to change in the world of education.
The last few newsletters on AI reflect a big part of our concerns in regards to how formal education might have continued relevance in the future. One question we've been asking ourselves is: "what are the new AAI (After AI) 21st century skills our young learners need to be citizens in catastrophic times?" We've all already incorporated our version of “21st century skills” into our curriculums, but, to some degree, that was before AI and Chat GPT shifted big aspects of the education landscape. For example: now that AI has arrived, what does it mean to assign a paper or what does it mean to ideate if all we need to do is ask an AI agent to fulfill and answer these questions? Additionally, when the intellectual resources to learn pretty much anything are directly available, what is the role of formal educational systems?
It is an exciting moment for us because we are collaboratively developing new enactive experimental approaches for 21st century engagement. We are curious about how we can both go back to projects like Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and move into new highly distributed and directly engaged models of making and inhabiting novel worlds that can stay with the troubles (e.g. 21st century education).
We will be writing some of these thoughts up in a series of three articles with colleagues for Venture Well this summer (stay tuned).
Within a few days of having the new 3D printers unboxed, racked up, wired, and networked, we'll be facilitating eleven workshop days focusing on Innovation and Creativity via 3D Printing and Design for Educators in the K-6 and 7-12 universes from all over New Jersey with our dear collaborator Andrew Harrison. This will be the fifth summer we are facilitating these innovation workshops -- each year is a more robust offering than the last. This summer, we are introducing workshops to collaboratively develop lesson plans with and for K-12 educators.
Perhaps the most exciting project this summer is that we've been invited to facilitate a 5-day seminar at the European Forum Alpbach in Austria. For those of you in central West Asia (Europe), you might already know what an interesting history Alpbach has (Gregory Bateson, Kumi Naidoo, Saskia Sassen, Indira Gandhi have all participated in events there, amongst many others). For those unfamiliar (including us!) - it has been compared to conferences, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Milken Institute Global Conference, or the World Economic Forum (WEF) at DAVOS.
Alpbach will host approximately 4,000 innovative beings from politics, business, civil society, culture, and science from over 70 countries over a two week span. Whatever it is exactly, we are really excited to be there, facilitating a collaboration on new approaches to changemaking. The title of our seminar is “Innovation & Green Changemaking”. We will keep you in the loop on how things are evolving, and if you are planning on attending, shoot us an email.
In regards to this, a special thanks goes out to our dear friend, former student, and now colleague Sebastian Swoboda for being a big part of the evolution of this opportunity.
Additionally, this summer we are doing a number of keynotes, lectures, podcasts, conversations, and creativity workshops both virtually and in person, of which we will try to keep everyone informed.
Over the last four newsletters (volumes 138, 139, 140, 141) we have been exploring various aspects of Artificial Intelligence (arguably better understood as AM or “algorithmic mimicry"). It is an area that we will come back to in the future. And in many regards, the focus of our next two topics (rethinking causality and worldmaking) is very closely related to questions of AI. If you missed the Varela Symposium “Sentience and Intelligence: AI, the More-Than-Human, and Us” you can still listen to any of the exceptionally interesting presentations by Signing up (free/donation) for access. The whole event was inspiring, moving, and insightful in regards to AI and what might really matter today.
Just reading the Guardian yesterday, we came across this opinion piece about the massive environmental costs of the very physical infrastructure of AI and its use. Again, well worth reading.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to dive into the turbulent waters of moving beyond causality.
This might at first sound absurd. We are fine with that.
Causality is a profoundly vexing part of our history and everyday reality.
How does anything happen?
The standard assumption is that if something has happened, there must be a “cause"—that there must be a source. But is this the case?
This is a profoundly problematic and highly contentious area of creativity and innovation practices. Far too often—in fact, almost always with causality—we defer to various versions of a linear causality – “this causes that”.
Our contention is that, from a pragmatic perspective, we should put aside causality. With the kinds of complex issues we are dealing with, from the most mundane (say, how to support the breast feeding of infants) to the most seemingly obvious (how to stop single use plastics), our causal intuitions are not helpful.
The challenging aspect of all of this is that, on one level, the problems with causality, especially forms of linear causality, are widely recognized – but yet they are carried on by those who critique them. So while everyone espouses to be both critical of linear causality and to not be linear in their approaches to creativity, the world of creativity is rife with these models.
Why are linear models of causality so problematic in relation to creativity?
This is not something we will get into this week. That is part of next week's newsletter. But if you want to explore our thinking on this topic, here is a good newsletter to start with: volume 88, (or, if you prefer to go all in, we’ve collected all our writings on constraints for you.)
This week our focus is far more modest, but equally important: to understand the issue, we need to have a sense of both how profoundly ubiquitous causal models are and what constitutes a linear causal model of creativity.
There are at least six very common (linear) causal approaches to creativity:
This approach to creativity, which we often refer to as the “god model,” exhibits a “nesting” approach to causality where something deep inside is the cause of things that are on the “surface” or at the next level (much like Russian nesting dolls):
These six approaches to creativity all exhibit a reductionist and essentialist causal logic and play a significant role in most approaches to creativity and innovation:
We can summarize some of the characteristics of these six (linear) causal models of creativity with nine attributes:
Causality is everywhere in our understanding of creativity and change. And linear causality is certainly the most prevalent form of causality.
What happens if neither linear causality nor causality in general are useful ways to understand and engage with how things come into being, especially in regards to creativity?
What happens when we leave linear causality behind? Have we thrown out the baby with the bath water?
“The idea of causality… has so dominated European thought that we have not emerged from this framework and explanatory regime, which acts as a powerful lever, especially in the realm of physical knowledge, in a way that remains unsuspected until our modernity… This is to such an extent that our modernity, for one part, is really formed by how we try to extricate ourselves from this yoke and lineage – for what if these had no other justification than our “habit” alone?” Francois Jullien
In this regard, last week's LinkedIn post that was critical of the Iceberg model led to quite an extended discussion with many who continued to see the value in this profoundly linear and essentialist approach. As Jullien points out, causality remains both a deep and unsuspected habit.
But that said, we also received a great deal of support for such a critique. Given this, we are curious about how you might be inventing new approaches (or old ones, such as “comprehensive propensity,” (da shi) from Wang Fuzhi) that diverge from causality. If interested, please reach out to us; we are always very curious in what you are doing; email or a conversation – you choose.
Whatever the propensities of your context, we hope that you have a great week.
Till next week
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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