Adjacent Possible Playground: By Design

Master structured thought, unlock generative conversations

John Kellden
4 min readNov 9, 2023

Cards for Insight: Why
Card-play conversations with human and AI-assisted annotations.
Mastering structured thought, unlocking generative conversations.

Play? Sign up here:
Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card

Cards for Insight: How to Play

… formulate and gather around generative center questions* …

Card*: Structured Thought
Mastering structured thought and
unlocking generative conversations,
at small group genius scope and
social machine scale.

… pick cards and add your thoughts to and between …

generative review: meaningful, thoughtful,
and productive digital discourse

… formulate and gather around generative center questions; pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them; engage in card-play conversations around questions, with human and AI-assisted card annotations addressing worthwhile dilemmas; cultivate shared understanding as generative closure; evaluate thoughts, insights, moves, paths and preferable outcomes against envisioned end game scenarios; collaborate on narratives and co-create knowledge artifacts building on the cards, card-play conversations and annotations …

Card: Design Artifacts
Cards, Spheroid Spirals, Generative Center Questions, Roped Paths
for Spiraling Lines of Inquiry, Card Decks, Pattern Languages, Social Machines, AI, Modular Dynamic Onto-Epistemology Knowledge Repositories, AI, Diagrams, Design Synthesis Diamonds, Roadmaps, Blogposts, Comment Threads, Empty Text Boxes and Chat.

… homestead different social machines by participating in
online communities of (card-play) conversation practice …

The above is a card-play conversation format. Cards together with
… patterns of play … forming roped paths to preferable outcomes,
lines of inquiry addressing worthwhile dilemmas and generative
sequences enabling structure-preserving transformation.

*There’s around 500 cards in the source deck, with more
than 100k two-card and 16M three-card combinations.
Two, three-, four- and five-card combinations, forming
an adjacent possible to LLM’s, Large Language Models.
Scaling conversations as if humans mind and matter.

Cards for structured thought, addressing worthwhile dilemmas.

Design Artifacts
AI is a collaborative meaning-making at social machine scale, design artifact. In and of itself it is not *more* important or relevant than any other design artifact.

Intelligence turned Ability, By Design
Design artifacts derive 103% of their relevance, importance and value, from how they facilitate contextual, conversational and anticipatory systems intelligence in general, and intelligence turned ability in particular.

“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability,
which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Card-play conversations homesteading social machines
Digital intelligence is quickness to apprehend relevant signal amidst information overwhelm as distinct from online ability, which is
capacity to leverage 21st century literacies in service to information
turned knowledge and act generatively, homesteading social machines, turning social media into social social media, extending our social cognition, online.

The Adjacent Possible Playground: A different social machine

Annotations
Design artifacts together with questions, cards and patterns of play can be leveraged, augmented and extended through card-play conversations combined with human and AI-assisted annotations.

Cards and card formats(text, annotations, media, affordances, underlying pattern languages, modular process onto-epistemologies and other metalayers) and annotation formats are also design artifacts.

An Adjacent Possible Playground
The adjacent possible in light of all of the above, is all about our individual human reach, beyond our limited situational awareness, beyond our online convenience, beyond our content consumption disposition, beyond our personal ken comfort zone grasp.

Card-play conversation forming spiraling lines of inquiry.

Generative Sequence
Review(attention turned situational awareness), story, tasks, moves and generative review.

The generative review of the adjacent possible is learning into aliveness, available as potential in our every step and (card-play) move, (co)creating our relevant next.

Circles turned Spirals
Steps turned (collaborative narrative) arcs, arcs turned circles, circles turned spirals and spirals turned spheroid spirals, around generative center questions and corresponding graphs represented as spheres.

Card: Network
A plurality of connections
that increases the possible
interactions and interactions
between agents and parts.

And, there and back again, finding ourselves beyond our old selves, somewhat closer to our preferable outcomes, bringing some of our
findings back to the village. By design.

“Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
“Our head would have o’erlooked the world!”
No doubt.”

— Robert Browning

*Generative Center Questions
Starting a card-play conversation with a generative center question
is a powerful way to anchor the discussion. It sets the tone for the
entire conversation, guiding participants toward a common purpose.
This question should encapsulate the core dilemma or issue the
conversation aims to address. It becomes the North Star, around
which all cards, thoughts, and patterns of play revolve.
Structured thought and generative conversations, by design.

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John Kellden
John Kellden

Written by John Kellden

Tools for navigating complexity, Cards catalyzing stories, Conversations that mind and matter, Digital communities and collaborative narratives

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