Cards for Insight: Lines
Conversational intelligence in a world not fully joined up.
How? Cards
Unlock new perspectives and insights with cards.
A Generative Power Set Analogy
Imagine Cards for Insight as a deck of 500 cards. Each card represents a single idea or notion. Combined, they form generative power sets.
- Play^n: Creative Exploration
- Game^n: Dynamic Connections
- Win^n: Preferable Outcomes
“^n” symbolizes the power set, which includes all possible combinations you can make with those cards (pairs, triples, etc.).
With Play^n, Game^n and Win^n, we’re not just looking at individual cards (ideas) but exploring the potential that emerges when we combine them (card-play, conversations, questions and insights).
Knowledge Recipes and Building Blocks
Think of a recipe as a single dish (original idea).
“^n” represents all the variations you can make on that recipe. You can add different spices (questions), adjust ingredients (human associations), prompts and responses(AI-assisted annotations) and experiment with cooking techniques (card-play conversations).
Think of Play^n as similar to “Play Anything”(Ian Bogost), Game^n as games seen as an Art of Agency(C. Thi Nguyen) and Win^n as exploring these variations, using the cards to create paths through possibility spaces, leading to preferable (more tasty and delicious) outcomes, (deeper understanding, breakthrough solutions).
Resonant cards and harmonious understanding
Imagine a card as a resonant notion, similar to a single musical note.
“^n” symbolizes the chords you can create by combining those notes. Chords offer a richer, more complex sound than a single note.
“Win^n” highlights how combining cards (ideas) with conversation, questions, and insights leads to a more harmonious and insightful understanding (like a compelling piece of music).
In short, cards played with generativity and preferable outcomes
in mind, helping us explore a much richer and more nuanced understanding of success.
The Shu Ha Ri of Card-play levels
Here’s a glimpse of three levels of card-play,
by analogy with Shu Ha Ri
Card: Actionable Insight
Use cards to generate insight
and take action together with
the other participants.
worthwhile dilemmas and preferable outcomes
Card: Preferable Outcomes
Use cards to explore ideas, generate
insights, and take thought. Together,
we learn, grow and unfold paths of
purposeful action.
Card: Win^n
The generative review of cards, card-play
and card-play conversations combined
with human and AI-assisted questions,
associations, insights and annotations.
Here’s how to play
Gather a small group around a worthwhile dilemma, formulate a generative center question. Pick a few cards and gain insight from exploring different perspectives, moving into an adjacent possible,
with generativity and preferable outcomes in mind.
The Turning
Data turned information, information turned knowledge, knowledge turned understanding, understanding turned understanding understanding (multi-order cybernetics and design cybernetics) and feedback turned small group genius, with cultivating shared understanding as generative closure, is how we’ll make it, at individual insight, small group genius card-play scope, social machine scale and social social media reach.
Card: Understanding
What if understanding is our ability
to hold space for the possibility of
knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds,
directs and discloses its relevance to
unexplored aspects of things known?
and gain insight around a chosen question
Card: Lines
“The greatest danger for most of us is not
that our aim is too high and we miss it,
but that it is too low and we reach it.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Lines
Ancestral
songlines.
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Lines
Entangled lines tracing spiraling
lines of inquiry facilitated through
questions, conversations, insights,
languages and technologies.
“The spiral is a spiritualized circle.
In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled,
has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Lines
Open, participatory inquiry,
enlivening convivial fields;
re-aligning unfolding paths
with evolutionary trajectories.
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Lines
“Life is a proliferation of loose ends.
It can only be carried on in a world
that is not fully joined up.”
— Tim Ingold
… pick cards and add your thoughts between in ways conducive to resonance, learning into aliveness, small group genius, shared understanding and paths turned luminous by joint sauntering …
Lines: A Brief History
“I wrote everything down in notes, on which I drew for my doctoral dissertation. But these months in the field were also a formative period for me. they were often lonely. In Lapland you are not surrounded by people all the time; on the contrary, you have to go out of your way to find them, and the sheer vastness of the environment, and its hollow silence, can be overwhelming. Here, the fieldworker is thrown largely on his own devices: it was expected of me, as of everyone else, that I should follow my own path and find things out for myself. Everybody has their personal path and is known by it, and familiarity with the landscape lies in the ability to recognize these paths from traces on the ground or litte signs placed here and there on rocks or trees, or from old fireplaces. Paths have their stories just as people do. Literally following in the footsteps of my Saami mentors, and endeavouring to learn by example, I also acquired a certain manner of carrying on, of combining movement and attention, which I have come to call ‘wayfaring’. But unlike the observations that filled my notebooks, this manner crept up on me unawares. I did not really notice it at the time. Without that experience, however, I doubt that I would ever have come to write this book.”
— Tim Ingold
… pick cards and add your thoughts, prompts, insights, individual and small group genius associations, annotations, book excerpts and prompt responses, between …
Cards for Insight: Q&U
- Gather a small group genius around a generative question
- Pick two cards and add your thoughts between
- Engage in conversation and cultivate shared understanding
in light of intelligence augmentation and intelligence turned ability - Take practical wisdom as a stopping rule and generative closure
- Create Q&U cardcasts, forming interactive supersets
to the more commonly known Q&A podcast formats
Q: Questions; U: Understanding, see cards below.
Since 103% of all co-creation of value resides in the links, feedback
loops, the in-between spaces and unique insights and annotations
from participants, let’s unfold a way to address this:
Cards for Insight
1. Addressing how we relate to information and meaning-making.
2. Pick two cards and add your thoughts between.
3. Notice social stigmergy and reflect on attention.
4. Design and homestead social learning systems in light of intelligence, networked intelligence and systems intelligence.
5. Experience and learn to use Cards for Insight — As easy as a card game, as powerful as a social machine.
6. Understand how to add value in light of situational awareness.
7. Interact to the full extent of your ability.
8. Map moves conducive to knowledge mapping and flows.
9. Play with frames, frame and reframe, move beyond rigid narratives.
10. Cultivate shared understanding in light of generative closure.
11. Take thought conducive to convivial conversation.
12. Extend conversations, at card formats, small group genius scope, social social media reach, networked distribution and social machine scale.
13. Coordinate by applying design cybernetics conducive to a requisite variety of paths between attention turned situational awareness and preferable outcomes.
… formulate and gather around generative questions; pick cards and add your thoughts to and between them; engage in card-play conversations around center, generative 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, and co-create knowledge artifacts building on the cards, card-play conversations and annotations …
Why? The Promise
Card: Indistinguishable
Any sufficiently advanced why
is indistinguishable from … .
Here’s how Alfred North Whitehead
might have completed it:
Alfred North Whitehead:
Any sufficiently advanced why is
indistinguishable from …
… grasping the interconnectedness of
all events and the ongoing process of
becoming.
He didn’t say that. He did say this though:
“Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types.
It is of the essence of types, that they be connected.
Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of
an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely
itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height
arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond
mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought
Now, your turn … the unfair advantage you have over
Alfred North Whitehead, not only will you be able to say
it, but you will be able to play it, together with others.
… formulate and gather around generative questions …
Card: Promise
In a network, the truth you might
be running from is so quiet, yet
it’s as profound as the promise,
the promise of a coming day.
… pick cards and add your thoughts before,
after, between, around and to the cards …
Card: Question
A question is mind rediscovering
the generative nature of relating
with reality and transforming it
into possibility.
… pick two cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Understanding
What if understanding is our
ability to hold space for the
possibility of knowledge, as
it emerges, unfolds, directs
and discloses its relevance
to unexplored aspects of
things known?
… pick two cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Cards
Cards are play, possibility space,
roped path, understanding and
shared understanding affordances.
… does this mean that it’s all about what
the Card does, rather than what it is? …
… yes …
Card: Relate
How do we relate to
information and
meaning-making?
… hold generative space for patterns of play conducive to conversations …
Card: Conversational Intelligence
Conversational intelligence is a function of curiosity,
social cognition, affordances and constraints, signs,
symbols and archetypal meaning-making and
essential character evolving along unfolding paths
made luminous by joint sauntering.
… invite to, facilitate and pursue, conversations that
mind, enact, cultivate, transform and matter …
Card: Conversational Intelligence
1. What role are you as a conversation participant assuming?
2. What purpose is your comment serving?
3. What needs can be addressed by the conversation?
4. What feedback, mutuality and learning is provided, by whom?
5. What (joint) focus on what story, tasks and what generative review?
6. What experience and knowledge is shared, what perspectives are explored?
7. What criteria are used, towards teasing out what insights?
8. Which are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a meaningful conversation, and what are the steps followed to ensure there’s shared understanding around these conditions?
9. What insights can be turned actionable, serving what local and community needs?
10. What intention, perspectives, language and tools are chosen and held, making for what action and practice?
11. What unique individual skills combined with what collective intelligence can help produce something extraordinary?
12. What networks of practice, co-evolving and co-creating what value, with what lines of inquiry?
13. Given all of the above, what key insights can be drawn and what actions taken, in order to solve what important issues?
… pick cards and add your thoughts in ways conducive to
insights conducive to addressing the issues at hand …
Your moves:
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
… jot down your thoughts as they relate to
the everyday world around us in general and
our worthwhile dilemmas in particular …
Play? Sign up here:
Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card
Cards for Insight: LLM’s
Cards, patterns of play and card-play conversations combine,
facilitating exploring paths between worthwhile dilemmas,
generative center questions and preferable outcomes.
There’s around 500 cards in the source deck, with more than 120k
two-card and 21M three-card combinations. With four-, five- and
six-card combinations mapping to LLM’s, Large Language Models, facilitating human associations(card-play) combining with
AI-assisted annotations(prompts and responses).
Think cards with an underlying pattern language and with an underlying Modular Process Onto-Epistemology forming part of an Online Commonplace, with a searchable Modular Knowledge Repository.
