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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 194! Five Key Terms for Creativity...
Good Morning transversal becomings,
It is the end of May, and this year the pace of differing speeds and movements certainly feels to us to be tending towards fast – even very fast. Spring is nearly gone, and summer is racing upon us – and so much is afoot!
For us, a special anniversary is coming up: on July 11th, we will publish our 200th Emerging Futures Newsletter! This is a call to celebrate. Four years ago, we decided, without knowing what would emerge, to publish a newsletter once a week on all things creativity and innovation. Time has sped up since then, such that the writing of the first issue seems like we just did it a year ago!
One of the great joys of writing the newsletter every week has been to interact with so many of you – our readers – who have in the process become friends, colleagues, collaborators, and even occasional sparring partners (very necessary!). Some of you write to us almost every week, and others only when something very special grabs your attention. This dialogue has shaped our thinking, the direction of the newsletter, and even the focus of our practice. And because of this, to celebrate our two hundredth issue, we would like to publish some personal reflections from you, our readers, on what the newsletter has meant to you.
If you wish, please take a moment to email us a reflection – it could be in any format (a letter, a video recording, an audio file, a drawing, a photo). And it could be any length – short or long. For our 200th issue, we just want to focus on you and what you have done with it.
This year, in the newsletter, we have explored creativity and innovation via two longer series:
In these two series, we explored the emotions, feelings, and affects of creativity from the sensations and aesthetics of boredom, frustration, horror, and disgust, to the feelings of the “yeah, yeah, yeahs”. We experimented with the differences between empathy, sympathy, and care. And in our more recent series on technology, we developed new approaches to assemblages, tools, relations, epicycles, and more.
One way to look at this is that this is all word-heavy – even jargony…
But words matter. To develop a new ecological approach to creative processes, we need to invent words, bend words and redefine words.
In these newsletters, we have done all of this with lots of words. Some of these are seemingly simple words – sensing, feeling, knowing, or relation – and others are decidedly technical sounding – transversals, transduction, epicycles, and feedforward loops. While still others have the feel that we know them – affordances, assemblages, configurations – but they never quite settle down in the ways we expect. And these are all ones that we have actively tested and changed over the last eighteen newsletters.
This play with language – this putting words to work reveals something important about words and how we use them. The meaning of a word is not found in the dictionary, nor is it decided on by the writers of dictionaries, and certainly not those business consultants who want to own, trademark, and gate-keep words. The meaning of a word, like the meaning of any other thing, emerges and lives in how we use them. Dictionaries and definitions just point out the main ways that we are using a word so far.
Words are tools – we use them much like we use other everyday tools. A good cooking knife can be used to chop and cut things in a myriad of ways, but it can also be used on its side to crush, mash, and transport. Or using the back edge to open a bottle of beer at the end of the night. But that same knife leaves the kitchen to go on many an adventure – into circus juggling and throwing acts, and then to battoning wood for a late-night campfire. Or into an experimental percussion ensemble – and from there, who knows! Along the way, it will be reshaped and reformed into a vast array of effective forms. Words are no different – we use every word in a myriad of distinct ways – some conventional and others experimental – language too can be exapted!
Dictionaries and especially Glossaries are beautiful things because they provide a record of the discoveries and inventions of the ways words have been put to use in specific contexts. Glossaries often feel like a kind of mash-up between a travel report and a how-to manual. They show us some great techniques, uses, styles of practice, and where we might go. While dictionaries can make words seem far drier and far more fussy, and even tedious, pedantic than they are, the journey written in definitions shows us the life of words to be one full of the passions, play, and pains that are to be found in all great adventures.
Perhaps you have a section on your bookshelf for dictionaries and other books on words? For us, these are extremely fascinating, and we have many, perhaps too many. I (Iain) was just gifted “A Scots Dictionary of Nature” by Amanda Thomson. This is a wonderful collection of historical Scottish words for engaging with the environment based on the categories of Land, Wood, Weather, Birds, Water, and Walking. Here, words like “angry teeth” (rainbow fragments), “bleffert” (sudden violent snow), and “taith” (grass growing where dung fell) give a living sense of a world alive in its unique body-environment-action couplings. While in Montreal recently, I picked up “Words of the Inuit: A Semantic Stroll through a Northern Culture” by Louis-Jacques Dorais. Inupiat, the language of the Inuit, is based around polysynthetic words – they say things in one word that would take a sentence in English. What interested me most was what was said using the same word part. Take “Sila” – this can be used as weather, the outside world (from what we would call natural to super-natural), air, the universe, the outside inside us (what we might call “spirit” or “soul”), wisdom, and reason. Being able to trace out the tightly knit relations of meaning reveals something unique about the world-making ways that just reading a single definition cannot.
The last book that has found its way into our Dictionary Shelf is not properly speaking a book at all, or even any form of work interested in giving a proper definition: “Blue” by Derek Jarman. The book is the text for the film of the same name – a movie in which we see a blue screen for seventy-nine minutes. Jarman was dying of AIDS related illnesses, and had lost his sight when he made this movie in 1993 (but he had first developed the concept for the film much earlier). It is an astonishing film, and reading the text turns out to be equally astonishing in its expansive play and meander with blue to the depths of personal and cultural meaning. This is the last page of the book – consider it too as part of an extended idiosyncratic definition-slash-meditation on the word “blue”:
Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
Our name will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.
Words do matter. How and where they are used matters. When a police officer says “stop” or a Judge says “Now you are married,” – significant environmental, institutional, infrastructural, and embodied changes are afoot. Our hope is that we also can play a role in shifting practices and habits and infrastructural possibilities of creative becomings by participating in new word-assemblage practices.
We have an ever-expanding and changing living glossary on our Emergent Futures Lab website (which has many more resources on all things creativity and innovation). This week, we continue our occasional newsletter glossary series with five words that are all very closely entangled in regards to creative practices:
Please enjoy these definitions as suggestions for the creative and experimental use of these words:
What is a relation? A relation is not something that simply connects existing things—it is the fundamental creative force that makes things what they are. Relations are ontologically real, meaning they exist as genuine features of reality rather than mere abstractions or concepts we impose on the world. When we speak of relations in the context of creativity and innovation, we are pointing to the dynamic, processual nature of reality itself, where the connections between elements (themselves processes) are more fundamental than the elements themselves.
Relations are the "middle" that we always already inhabit—the space between subject and object, self and world, where creative emergence happens (that gives rise to subject and object, etc.). They are what the philosopher Evan Thompson describes as the "patterns, networks, organizations, configurations or webs" that constitute reality at every scale. Relations are both what comes after things (connecting them) and what comes before things (making them possible).
What we directly sense and experience as the world is itself a relation (in this case, an “affordance”). When you walk across a carpet, the "walkability" you experience is not a property stored in the carpet waiting to be discovered, nor is it simply in your mind. The walkability emerges from the relation between your embodied capacities, your intentions, and the material configuration of the environment. This relational experience is not secondary to some more "real" underlying reality—it IS reality as it shows up for you.
Emergent Agency: In relational configurations, agency—the capacity to effect and be affected—does not reside in any single component but emerges from the configuration itself. Like a soccer game, you cannot find the meaning or logic in the ball, field, or individual players alone; it emerges from their particular relations and their emergent logic.
System Causation: Relations exhibit what can also be called "downward causation"—the emergent relational whole has the capacity to shape its parts. When people and things are brought into stable relations, the relation changes both the people and the things. This is why collaboration doesn't just combine pre-existing creative capacities; it makes its collaborators.
Dynamic Processuality: Relations are not static connections but ongoing processes. It's more accurate to speak of "relating" rather than "relations"—dynamic becomings rather than static beings. Everything we are part of is a creative becoming, a dynamic relation-dominant process – a “strange loop”:
Understanding the primacy of relations fundamentally shifts how we approach creativity and innovation. Instead of focusing on individual creative people or discrete innovative objects, we begin to work with the relational dynamics that give rise to novel possibilities (novel configurations and their propensities).
Creative processes are not about having ideas that we then implement in the world. They are about participating in relation-dominant configurations that tend toward emergent novelty. This means the designer becomes what Brian Massumi calls "a helpmate to emergence"—someone who works with relational dynamics rather than imposing predetermined visions.
If creativity emerges from relational configurations, then our focus shifts from developing individual creative capacities to cultivating the conditions for novel relations to form and stabilize. This involves attending to the assemblages of environments, tools, practices, concepts, and collaborators that give rise to creative possibilities (configurational and ecosystemic creativity).
Consider the evolution of flight in dinosaurs. Flight did not emerge because feathers, wings, or bones were individually designed for flying. Rather, flight emerged as a novel relation between elements that were originally unintended for flight—feathers, limbs, gravity, air density, and trees. The relation of flight then shaped and transformed these elements, leading to the development of wings, specialized bones, and other features suited to the novel relational activity.
Similarly, when we speak of innovation in organizations, we're not talking about collecting creative individuals in a room. We're describing the cultivation of relation-dominant assemblages where novel possibilities can emerge from the dynamic interaction of people, tools, environments, practices, and concepts working together in ways that exceed any individual's intentions or control.
The creative process is always happening in what we call "the middle"—that space of active relations where new possibilities emerge through experimental engagement rather than predetermined design. Learning to work skillfully with relations means learning to participate in creativity as a fundamentally collaborative, more-than-human process of emergent worldmaking.
Connections to Explore: Marlyn Strathern
See: Assemblage, Configurations, Emergence, Transversal
Transversal refers to a form of sideways or lateral movement that cuts across established pathways, domains, or developmental trajectories. Rather than following a linear, predetermined path toward a predetermined goal, transversal movements create unexpected connections and new possibilities through cross-domain transformation.
While they might go unnoticed, transversal pathways and movements are always present, necessary, profoundly active, and possible in even the most seemingly linear and regimented of systems. In most contexts, transversal paths are always multiple (see Thickets):
Sideways movement: Characterized by lateral shifts across different domains or contexts rather than forward progress within a single domain. These movements create "entangled thickets" of interconnection rather than tree-like hierarchies. Such movements can happen at any time and place.
Transversal movements contradict the notion that change, evolution or innovation follows a straight line toward predetermined ends. Instead of seeing development as "half steps" toward a final form (like "half a wing" evolving into a complete wing), transversal processes recognize that each state/moment has its own completeness, contextual utility and is always open to move towards multiple other possible futures.
Transduction (non-linear movement): Sideways or horizontal movements give rise to the unexpected interaction of unlike things that lead to novel emergent relations towards novel processes, practices, techniques, or ecologies across vastly differing fields. For example, the horizontal exchange of genetic materials between fungi and early aquatic plants led to qualitatively novel plant forms that came onto land. Small additions have large transformational impacts.
Evolutionary biology: Darwin initially made the mistake of seeing wings as developing in a linear progression toward flight, but later recognized that early feathered arms (wings) served completely different functions (warmth, display, egg laying, defence, etc.). And that any existing effect could be co-opted transversally towards the co-development of new qualitatively different effects, including swimming, egg warming, flight, sexual display, running, etc.
Lynn Magulis (and many Soviet Evolutionary Biologists) discovered that the major qualitative developments in evolution (such as the emergence of multicellular life) were the outcome of one cell engulfing another very different one (Endosymbiosis) rather than a linear process of branching speciation.
Creative practice: In creative contexts, transversal approaches involve deliberately breaking patterns and exploring unexpected configurations, such as stopping processes at unconventional times or using tools in unintended ways to discover new possibilities.
Transversal movements appear as the co-opting of intentional things for unintended uses in new contexts (exaptative design), transformative hybridization and cross-pollination between different approaches. The history of early experiments in heavier than air human powered flight shows how various innovators borrowed, adapted, and recombined elements across approaches rather than working in isolation.
Organizational design: Facilitating transversal movement requires infrastructure that enables practices, technologies, people and even environments to leap into new configurations in a strategic and ongoing manner. to shift between roles, share knowledge openly, and allow failures to contribute to other directions rather than narrowing toward a single approach.
Transversal thinking is closely associated with emergent properties in complex systems, meta-stability across different states, and the concept of "following unintended capacities" in experimentation (exaptation). It challenges essentialist models of creativity and innovation that presume predetermined endpoints or linear development paths.
Sources and Connections to Explore: Often called Rhizomes, and the practice, Rhizomatics. Especially developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis, Concepts of Symbiogenesis Liya Nikolaevna Khakhina
See: Thickets, Exaptation, Emergence
A thicket is a dense, interconnected ecosystem of actors, processes, technologies, and relationships that collectively gives rise to innovation and creative change. Unlike traditional models that portray change and development (innovation) as a linear tree-like branching path of a singular origin (breakthrough), thickets represent the messy, entangled, and transversal reality where novelty actually emerges.
Within these complex networks, multiple agents are simultaneously exploring, some communicating with each other and some not, all participating in a distributed process of co-emergence that exceeds any individual contribution. What defines thickets is their multiple transversal connections that act to transduce novelty:
Thickets challenge our conventional understanding of innovation as emanating from individual genius or isolated moments of insight. Instead, they reveal creativity as fundamentally relational and emergent, arising from the middle of ongoing activity (doing). When examining historical innovations like human flight, we discover not a single heroic inventor (the Wright Brothers) but a thicket of simultaneous experiments, debates, and collaborations over multiple time-scales – some successful, others not – that collectively perturbated the space of possibility towards the emergence of the ecosystem of flight (see Epicycles and Feedforward).
The power of thickets lies in their transversal nature; connections form across domains, disciplines, and practices, creating rich environments where unintended capacities can be discovered and followed. These environments aren't merely collections of discrete components but complex assemblages that generate emergent properties exceeding the sum of their parts.
Thickets can be understood as dynamic webs rather than simple extensions of human capacity. Consider how a bed isn't simply an object but exists within "a vast world of highly interconnected things upon things upon things" -from mattresses to sleep monitoring devices, from manufacturing regulations to cultural sleep rituals. This web-like logic reveals how nothing technological exists in isolation; everything participates in multiple assemblages simultaneously.
Thickets can also be viewed as nurseries for "epicycles" -novel patterns that gain independence from the ongoing network, developing their own agency and capacity to transform existing systems. These epicycles "feed forward," shifting our propensities and changing what's possible in our world.
Operating effectively within thickets requires abandoning both the illusion of central control and that the world is ultimately organized in a linear tree-like manner in favor of relational agency-understanding that our creative power comes not from standing outside the system but from skilled participation within it.
This involves:
The development of human flight exemplifies thicket dynamics. The Wright Brothers weren't isolated geniuses but bicycle builders who became embedded in an extensive network of experimentation and communication. They read literature, built kites, found appropriate testing environments, and participated in ongoing debates about flight principles. While they might have been the first to fly – it was not by much, nor was their contribution the source of all that followed. Within a decade and a half of their first successful flight, they no longer built planes. Rather, what led to the world of flight was a vast transversal ecosystemic thicket of interwoven experiments developing as a novel epicycle (see epicycles and feedforward).
Similarly, technologies like oak nuts reveal the multiple potential futures contained within thickets. An oak nut can become a tree when interacting with soil and sun, food when discovered by a piglet, or soil nutrients when damaged by a passing dirt bike. Nothing exists "outside of the complex assemblage that gives rise to multiple equally possible futures".
Innovation emerges not from mastering the thicket through control but from skillful participation that helps shape its self-organizing processes toward novel outcomes. By recognizing ourselves as part of these dynamic ecosystems rather than separate from them, we open ourselves to the rich creative possibilities that thickets contain.
Sources and Connections to Explore: Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis, A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mutualistic Networks Bascompte & Jordano, Hypersea McMenamin & McMenamin
See: Transversal, Exaptation, Ecosystems, Configurations, Epicycles, Feedforward
Epicycles are emergent cycles (minor systems) that arise from existing cyclical systems but develop their own autonomy and agency (Gary Tomlinson). They are not simply new components within a system, but novel processes that separate from their originating conditions to form their own self-organizing dynamics. An epicycle when it stabilizes and becomes a distinct entity can additionally have the power to recursively shape the very systems from which it emerged (see feedforward processes).
At the heart of this concept is a recognition that creativity and innovation aren't linear processes of ideation followed by implementation, but rather complex, distributed, emergent processes where novel arrangements gain their own momentum and transformative power.
Epicycles emerge via a combination of refusing existing logics, practices, and propensities (see blocking). And the experimental development of an exaptive ecology (a “thicket”) that both actively refuses the given and co-opts it towards qualitatively new novel possibilities. This involves practices of threshold seeking and invention (a threshold of qualitative change).
Consider how the world around us is filled with nested, self-reproducing ecosystems – culture, education, transportation – stable cycles looping and self-reinforcing through habits, practices, skills, concepts, discourses, and institutions. Within these stable systems, experiments continually emerge. Most are simply reabsorbed, but occasionally, something coalesces and stabilizes outside the main cycle, gaining functional emergence with its own techniques, tools, and practices converging into new propensities.
An epicycle is a novel world-in-the-making. It can exist within a larger system or outside of the system. This is where epicycles become truly fascinating for creative practice. As a novel arrangement of tools, practices, environments, and embodiments stabilizes, it can begin to operate with relative autonomy from the systems that generated it. Then, astonishingly, this emergent epicycle begins to exert its own transformative pressure on those original systems (see Feedforward).
Rather than seeing innovation through essentialist models like trees, pyramids, or icebergs-which suggest singular origins and linear progress-epicycles help us understand change as distributed, relational, and emergent. Innovation isn't about isolated genius or heroic individuals imposing ideas on passive matter. It's about participating in and nurturing the self-organizing propensities of complex systems.
Epicycles are not just loops; they are creative loops that stabilize emergent effects, which, in turn, stabilize the networks that produced them. The dragon eating its tail, as it were - a strange ouroborian loop of co-creation where the emergent effects transform the components of the network.
What makes epicycles particularly powerful for understanding creativity is their ability to cross thresholds of qualitative difference. They aren't simply incremental improvements within existing paradigms but represent genuine ontological novelty; new ways of being alive.
Key features of epicycles include:
Understanding epicycles fundamentally shifts how we approach innovation. Rather than seeking to identify "winners" early or narrowing possibilities toward a single solution, we might instead focus on building fertile ecosystems from which multiple approaches can emerge, gain a collective agency, and co-create a qualitatively new “system” that exceeds any one of the players' understanding or agency.
This means:
The practical challenge becomes how to sense when an epicycle is forming, how to support its autonomy without collapsing it back into existing patterns, and how to allow it to develop its own feedforward agency.
The development of flight offers a perfect illustration of epicycles at work. While conventional narratives center the Wright brothers as heroic inventors of the airplane, a more accurate understanding sees them as contributors within a vast emerging ecosystem.
By 1919, barely fifteen years after their first flights, the Wright brothers had stopped making planes entirely. Their specific approach-wing warping-couldn't scale and was replaced by entirely different control mechanisms. Meanwhile, across the globe, similar propensities were emerging simultaneously: someone in New Zealand was developing a single-wing flap system, others in France were working on different approaches, all without direct communication.
What was actually happening was the emergence of an epicycle - a new world of flight forming outside existing transportation systems. This epicycle gradually gained autonomy and infrastructure: airports, companies, business models, technologies. Eventually, this stabilized epicycle of air travel began to exert feedforward pressure on the entire transportation system, transforming how humans move across the planet.
The true innovation wasn't the singular invention by isolated geniuses, but the co-emergence of a new world with its own internal logic and external transformative power. The epicycle of flight, once stabilized, changed everything around it while maintaining its own distinct identity.
In this way, epicycles remind us that creativity isn't about solving problems to return to stability, but rather about worldmaking – inventing problems worth having for worlds worth making. The most powerful innovations don't simply fit within existing frameworks; they become new frameworks that reshape everything around them.
Sources & Connections to Explore: A Million Years of MusicCulture and the Course of Human Evolution Gary Tomlinson, Power/Knowledge Michel Foucault, Political Affect Life War Earth John Protevi
See: Assemblages, Dispositif, Feedforward
Feedforward is a critical dynamic in creative processes where a novel element or system emerges (“epicycles”) that stands outside the cycles that produced it, yet exerts significant influence back on those originating systems without being substantially changed by them.
In systems terms, feedforward represents those elements that significantly impact a system but remain largely unchanged by it. The weather changes a baseball game entirely, but the game doesn't change the weather. Mountains shape weather patterns, but aren't shaped by them in return. But uniquely in creative processes, these feedforward elements can emerge from within the very systems they come to influence.
Feedforward emerges when a novel approach or practice becomes so integrated, autonomous, and durable that it comes to exert a control-like function over the cultural cycles from which it arose. This is fundamentally different from both positive feedback (which pushes systems into new states) and negative feedback (which stabilizes systems). Feedforward introduces a transformative asymmetry where the emergent element shapes its source conditions without being equally shaped in return.
At its core, feedforward helps us understand how truly novel forms of creative practice emerge and gain autonomy. In creative processes, we're not merely adapting existing patterns but potentially generating entirely new epicycles – new autonomous systems that can stand outside their originating conditions and reshape them.
This is not the standard ideation-first model that most innovation systems promote. Rather than seeing creativity as a linear process of idea generation followed by execution, feedforward reveals how novelty gains agency through complex, non-linear emergent processes. The epicyclic nature of feedforward helps explain why genuinely transformative innovation often appears to have a "mind of its own" – the emergent configuration itself possesses agency beyond any of its individual elements.
Feedforward could also be understood as "emergent autonomy with transformative influence" of "creative epicycles." These epicycles are emergent configurations that develop their own internal coherence and begin to act as if they were controlling elements, shaping the very systems from which they arose while maintaining their distinctness.
Feedforward in creativity involves several key features:
Understanding feedforward dramatically shifts how we approach innovation. Instead of focusing on individual "eureka" moments or ideas, we need to build ecosystemic conditions where novel approaches can emerge, gain autonomy, and potentially reshape existing systems.
This requires creating what we might call "fertile ecosystems" that support multiple parallel approaches rather than prematurely narrowing to a single path (while refusing given logics, practices, and propensities). It means resisting the urge to "find the winner" and instead fostering cross-pollination, sideways movement, and productive failures that can contribute to emerging epicycles.
In practical terms, creative processes benefit from:
The Wright Brothers provide an illustrative example not of individual genius but of ecosystemic innovation that produced feedforward epicycles. The emergence of controlled flight wasn't simply about building a flying machine but about the emergence of an entire aviation ecosystem. As this new system stabilized through airports, companies, business models, and infrastructure, it began to function as a feedforward epicycle, reshaping transportation systems more broadly.
Similarly, the internal combustion engine moved transversally across different domains, from early experiments to automobiles to aviation. As these applications stabilized into their own autonomous systems, they began to exert feedforward influences, reshaping everything from urban development to manufacturing processes.
In our daily creative practices, feedforward might manifest as novel approaches that initially emerge from experimentation but eventually gain enough coherence to reshape our entire way of working. These could be small – new drawing techniques that transform an artist's entire practice – or large, like emergent digital technologies that reshape entire industries.
Understanding feedforward reminds us that creativity is not about individual moments of insight but about participating in and nurturing emergent processes that might develop their own autonomous agency. The most profound innovations aren't simply solutions to existing problems -- they're emergent epicycles that reshape how we understand what problems and solutions are in the first place. Ultimately this approach of Feedforward Epicycles gives us a radically new theory of change and emergent innovation.
Sources & Connections to Explore: A Million Years of Music Culture and the Course of Human Evolution Gary Tomlinson, Extending the Explanatory Scope Wagner & Tomlinson, Power/Knowledge Michel Foucault, Political Affect Life War Earth John Protevi, Seeing Like a State James C. Scott
See: Epicycles, Emergence, Apparatus/Dispositif
With that, we wish you a great week working with and against the tools of language and their more-than-linguistic effects.
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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