Good morning creative sense-making beings innovating before sense emerges,

What a week! After last week’s intensive, both of us got quite sick – filling our respective households with tissues, and debates over the merits of ginger tea. We are on the mend, and looking forward to getting out this weekend and dancing with some snow flurries in the forest.

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On Doing and Using

This week we have been experimenting further with worlds, users and use generated innovation.

The radical challenge in creative practices for humans is that we in general rely on our powers to ideate, but ideation is on the whole a conservative practice (reliant on existing concepts, logics and representations, etc).

The simple answer to this seeming paradox is that the catalyst for our ability to engage with the new comes not directly from our thinking but from our doing – from our use of things.

In using things in our everyday lives we are pulled by the intended and unintended capacities of things into both standard routines and occasionally new directions.

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These unintended capacities are what are termed exaptations – and being critical to creative practices are something we have written about extensively. The now classical example of an exaptation is the dinosaur feather which first developed out of the sequestration toxins in scales, and had the unintended capacity to hold heat, pigments, etc. which lead to small and large feathers covering dinosaurs – and via a series of further unintended capacities emerging in these feathery structures (wings) some smaller feathery winged dinosaurs came to fly.

This process of utilizing unintended capacities in things has been shown to be a critical aspect of all human inventions – not the only thing that is critical to creativity, but one critical – and for far too long unrecognized, aspect of all (human) creativity.

What matters is that doing things with things is far more important to creative practices than withdrawn individualistic ideation.

While we find that this is recognized to some degree by most involved in creative practices, it is often downplayed and seen as something that can be adequately replaced by special acts of creative thinking in individuals who are deeply immersed in doing things (have expertise in the area they are innovating in).

One current example of this is the renewed interest in C. S. Pierce concept of Abductive reasoning. Pierce, an important American pragmatist philosopher, logician and semologist (1839-1914) posited three forms of reasoning: deductive, inductive, and abductive. Where deductive reasoning moves from general to specific and inductive goes from specific to general, abductive does neither but reasons via the making of new connections between unrelated concepts. While abductive reasoning can be quite helpful, but divorced from experimental engagement – doing things with things, it falls back into the problem of the conservative nature of ideation.

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One of the assumptions that leads us astray in this regard is that we assume that we can know what something can do (or “is”) abstractly – just by looking at it, or it's representation. And while it is true that we can know most of what the intended uses of things are just by looking at it and identifying what it is (using a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning). For example: we can easily recognize a chair, and we know its intended use. But we cannot really get a sense of all that it can do just through a general identification of what it “is”. We need to engage with it – we need to use it to go further. And ultimately we need to experimentally do novel things with it.  It is only then that novel capacities will potentially emerge. And there is simply no getting around this.

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Here we come to the crux of the matter: where is this novel “capacity”? Is it in the chair? Is it in our heads? The most compelling answer is that it is in neither. The capacity of sitting for example is “in” the relation between an object and an subject capable of sitting. A chair becomes a chair only for an embodied subject (organism) who has the physical form suited to using it for sitting – for a spider this object has none of those capacities.

This is equally true with our dinosaur and feathers – in very specific circumstances the feathery flappy appendages that keep eggs warm, scare off predators, and help it look sexy could also have the unintended relational capacity of allowing it to fall out of a tree and not die.

Affordances/Reality = A Three-Way Relationship

The environmental psychologists Eleanor and James Gibson did much to develop and theorize how we engage with such relational capacities (Eleanor 1910-2002, James 1904-1979). They coined the very helpful term for this: Affordances. A wonderful revised definition of affordances has been developed:

“Affordances are relations between aspects [not features] of a material environment and abilities available in a form of life.” (Rietveld and Kiverstein).

One can think of the intended uses of a thing as the stabilized and fully developed affordances. Our worldly (cultured) bodies develop the muscular abilities and embodied habits of sitting on things in certain ways. And while we most commonly ascribe these capacities to things (such as chair) outside of ourselves, or occasionally when in a relativistic and subjective mood to our internal representations (“its only a chair to us”) – both of these are a serious mistake. The affordance is in – or better “of” the relation. A relation that involves both some aspect of the environment and an embodied subject but equally important is the socio-cultural aspects of the context.

This third aspect is critical – we are always of a world – a form of life that fundamentally shapes what and how we sense (this was the focus of last week's newsletter). Affordances are “meanings available in the environment” to us as part of an organized way of being alive.

We perceive – sense a meaningful environment in a directly enacted manner.

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The Challenge of the Radically New

And this brings us back to where we began this newsletter: the challenge of the new is that we cannot ideate it (as the radically new will always exceed our language, concepts and representations). But, the challenges with creativity do not go away just by embracing doing. While doing – using things – will in theory allow us to go further and potentially discover unintended capacities (novel affordances/exaptations) – using things alone is not enough.

How we use things in our everyday life is so tightly woven into our way of life (enacted) that we live in and of a specifically meaningful environment. Our world – reality – is enacted – brought forth relationally such that it is neither subjective nor objective in any simple sense (both of these options, while easy to grasp, are false). We are worldmaking beings that are fully of our collective worlds.

The real difficulty for creativity is not just the paradoxes and fundamental limits of ideation but two other things: (1) that our most basic acts of sense-making – perceiving – are fully of a way of being such that novelty even when it comes into being (and it is always there) is beyond our standard capacities to sense it in doing. We live in and of a meaningful world – and the new exceeds meaning, utility and purpose. And (2) that the new does not pre-exist its emergence in the act of doing something with something that produces a novel relation (affordance/exaptation).

To “sense” novel affordances requires the development of paradoxical experimental practices – strange forms of embodied using and doing that refuse habits, and known capacities via a process of blocking – and work with and towards what cannot be sensed. And when later, if the novel emergent relations are stabilized, will be sensed – but not yet recognized.

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Users and Use Generated Creativity

In this way all creativity needs to consider and actively engage actual agents and actual forms of agency and their actual milieu. One could easily see this as an argument to bring back the “user” into the mix. And while this is reasonable and accurate in general – afterall we are arguing that novel affordances (exaptations) can only emerge in the experimental doing – the using of something in some manner. We do need to be cautious:

How we use this concept of a “user” is quite loaded. In approaching us and how we live meaningful deeply embedded lives as “users” is to potentially radically disembed us from the world we are of.

Becoming a “user” in our contemporary sense of the term separates us into being a unique, complete and whole-in-itself entity facing a neutral world of “choices” of what to use to fulfill our supposedly objective “needs” and our less objective “wants”. We become worldless neutral universal agents – beings without affordances (either normal or exaptive)…

But we don’t simply use things to fulfill needs and wants – the “we” that does things – the we that is a specific sense-making being is always already the outcome of our collective intra-actions with things. We are enactive co-worldmakers.

But there is a way to care for how we are of a world in what we do – and by starting with actual embodied, extended and enactive encultured subjects and collaboratively focusing on their worlds and its concerns, which,when done well, can lead to innovative and meaningful co-emergent variants of existing affordances (change-in-degree).

But this approach to innovation has, as we have argued, great difficulty in effectively generating qualitatively unique outcomes – novel exaptive affordances (change in kind).

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Radical innovation processes are profoundly different from the techniques that work well in producing change in degree (collaborative world expanding practices of developing novel variations of existing affordances).

Creative processes for the genuinely new require highly engaged – use generated – experimentation where what something can afford in a certain circumstance for a particular agent cannot be known in advance (it precedes sense-making). For this, an experimental form of engagement (“use”) becomes both necessary and paramount. This is an experimental process for developing novel emergent circumstances (novel assemblages) that actively refuse the given (purpose/existing affordances) in favor of new and unintended possibilities (novel affordances – exaptations), which self-generate a feed-forward process stabilizing an emergent novel world.

Such experimental processes allow new forms of practices, subjects, environments and meaning to co-emerge – the user and the use are the emergent outcome of the innovation processes (e.g. worldmaking).

In some sense the two processes (what could be very cautiously called “user centered innovation” and “use-generated innovation”) can look quite similar as they begin in similar manners (with actual embodied participants engaged in actual practices). But, their approach, techniques and goals are necessarily different.

Both forms of innovation are important, and one does not take precedence over the other – they are in contrast rather than opposition. But, what is critical is not to assume that the techniques of one are the techniques of the other.

What does matter in both is that we understand the relational nature of capacities – of affordances. That meaning emerges in action – in use – and remains in and of the world – a world. The function of things is not in the thing or in the thing’s form alone – it is relational and emerges always from and in use.

To be engaged in creative processes whatsoever (both change-in-degree and kind) is to directly engage with what emerges from the middle of a unique act of doing. And this can never be replaced by forms of distanced ideation.  What our actions touch when we touch things are what they afford us – and this affordance that we touch directly is not in the thing or in us but is the relation that makes us.

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Creativity is thus an act in which unintended affordances emerge and carry us into new becomings – the becoming bird of the dinosaur…

Till Volume 77,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate

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