Week 17
A difficult week, intuition as a method of problem solving, Socrates' theory of knowledge, a social innovation database and Photolapse - a piece that aims to commentate on internet surveillance.
This past week was a difficult one. Here’s why:
Co-taught the last (concept-driven) ThinkLab class with my mentor and started preparing for how I plan to do it alone for the next batch.
Travelled to Guwahati to co-facilitate a design thinking workshop. Also walked along the Brahmaputra till midnight.
Synthesised a bunch of qualitative research. Wrote, wrote and re-wrote to finally get a tad bit better at articulation. Felt proud.
Got featured on a creative coding community and got a bunch of business queries. Finally re-instated some long-lost self-confidence.
Got rejected (again) from a tech fair in another desperate attempt to be part of a larger like-minded community.
Had interesting, hard-hitting conversations. Wished I wasn’t me.
Due to all of this, and the headspace that I was in, the Sunday morning writing ritual took a hit. Here are some of my scattered learnings from this week:
[Learnings] Intuition as a method of problem-solving
For the longest time, I was extremely dismissive of intuitive thinking as a method to use while problem-solving. Part of it was because of how often people resorted to it and the lack of questions around an intuitive decision, simply because the decision was taken by a certain person (whose intuition you trust).
However, in an interesting presentation by Colin Galen (a highly ranked competitive coder and undergraduate computer science student), I started to realise how often intuition plays a part in the problem-solving process. I just hadn’t realised it.
If you were to never rely on intuition, you’d take so long for every single decision; time that you cannot afford in a project. Think about it, sometimes, you look at a piece of data and you intuitively decide to use a framework to analyse it. Sure, you can provide a logical justification for it afterwards (you can provide a logical justification for just about anything, I’ve realised) and it’ll make sense too, but the starting point for it was not an extensive decision tree or a comparative analysis of all possible methods. It was you, your past knowledge and your hunches.
Colin in his talk explains how this happens and I’ve attempted to phrase it in accordance with my own understanding of this process:
Say you have a concrete experience. Something happens, and something happens as a result of it. If you spend enough time thinking about this concrete experience, you’ll perform some sort of abstraction to this experience. A conversation might turn into a generalisation, a way to do something might turn into a conceptual framework, an order of steps to achieve something might turn into a process … and so on.
What you would have done, had you actually thought about it and done an abstraction of sorts, would be to derive something from a hyper-specific context that could be applied to other contexts as well. This ‘something’ is an addition to your knowledge / experience / knowledge-because-of-experience bank.
Next, when you’re faced with a different situation where you feel like this concept could be used, your intuition suggests whatever you had stored in your knowledge bank and all you do is a bit of tweaking to fit it into this hyper-specific context. Abstraction of experiences are like plug-n-play formulas; change the values and you’re good to go.
[Learnings] Socrates and the theory of knowledge
This week, I also spent some time digging into the processes of learning. In a rabbit hole of sorts, I found myself exploring Socrates' Theory of Knowledge and while I won’t go on a philosophical vomit, here is an interesting thought:
Socrates believed that you should go into a ‘search’ knowing nothing. He famously said, “The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing”. Interesting how this plays out in today’s world, isn’t it? Design Researchers are told to go in with a ‘child-like’ mindset, to assume that they know nothing of the topic they are enquiring about and letting the interviewees to guide the conversation. It is strangely wonderful to see that so many of the principles we use today might have had roots in such ‘ancient’ thoughts, thereby strengthening the value of these thoughts. I think it would be a good idea to go back to the foundations of knowledge and all the other things, to understand what the modern world and all its theories are based on.
[Resources] Social Innovation project database and the massive scale of it all
Found this extremely cool project, made by researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde and Manchester in the UK and the University of Leon in Spain, that documents 11,456 social innovation projects across the world.
I remember looking at this and thinking, damn. Will whatever I create become just another one of these, one more to raise the number to 11,457?
Looking at all that is happening with the world in conjunction with global population crossing 8 billion people, the scale of it tends to make you feel ever so tiny and useless.
In case you feel like this too, try looking at this Carl Sagan quote. It’s one of my absolute favourites.
The actual database is here.
[Experiments] Photolapse
This year, the WTDA called for entries that were ‘critical dialogues on technology cultures.’ Photolapse was my submission for the same.
Photolapse was a computer program that took images, every passing second, using a webcam and then pasted them on the screen at a random position. It was meant to be a take on how extensively internet companies surveil us, every time that we sit in front of a computer screen.
Alas, it wasn’t good enough for the festival. Next time, I guess.