How To Break Anything

Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.

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      16 Dec 2010

      From: Connecting All The Dots - Ray Kurzweil on pattern recognition (and an abstract thesis of mine)

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      Ray Kurzweil too, expounds on this idea of the power of patterns: 

      “I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It's something that transcends the semblance of parts you've put together. That is the nature of technology, and it's the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the rightcombination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.”

      via bigthink.com

      My general thesis is that value comes from arranging things in a way that complement and fit within our biological limitations. These limitations constrain us to recognize patterns in only very specific ways, and in that very constraint lies value.

      (This is an abstract statement, so one purpose of this blog is to organize information in a way that this illuminates this thesis, solidifying and fading it into view slowly over time. A wonderfully emergent expression of itself, perhaps.)

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      17 Nov 2010

      on "The more you know, the more patterns you recognize"

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      What Dr. Borowitz finds most intriguing is the prospect of technology that works hand-in-hand in helping physicians with their most important cognitive task. “What doctors do when they make diagnoses is pattern recognition,” he explained. “And the more you know, the more patterns you recognize.”

      via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

      A simple line from an article on more data being available to physicians for diagnosis. It of course applies to a lot more than just medicine - it's a basic rule of understanding the world.

      I think the reason I originally started thinking of the notion of "how to break anything" is the idea that rules are just rules - and they are indeed meant to be broken. But not to be broken for breaking's sake - rules are made by people who know why they're made, and they're of course always made for a reason.

      But when you understand why rules exist - well, then you understand how to constructively break them. Breaking the rule has then added something to the world.

      This can apply to the mundane rules that guide daily behavior of course, but generally I apply this to the limitations we create to help understand complex behavior ('psychology,' 'sociology,' 'marketing,' etc.). It could be said that the one thing that all artists share in common is that they understand the rules of their particular world, and know how to best break them. 

      To bring it back to the above excerpt: the silly little line I would use when I first started writing here was something like "How to break anything? Observe everything."

      (Oh and of course the idea of pattern recognition is a cornerstone of what I do on my daily task of 'trends analysis.' For now, I'll let someone more brilliant than myself like Magnus Lundkvist go into depth on that if you'd like.)

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      Kyle Cameron Studstill
    • Obox Design
  • How To Break Anything

    Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.

    These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.

    ("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.

    So how to break anything? Observe everything.

    [You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])

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