Lexicon

"Author: Mark Bode, Tabo Goudswaard & Remko van der Pluijm"

A

Aesthetics

Aesthetics (/ɛsˈθɛtɪks/; also spelled æsthetics and esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty.

B

Bottom-up

Top-down and bottom-up are both strategies of information processing and knowledge ordering, used in a variety of fields including software, humanistic and ...

C

Complex adaptive systems

In his book Connected Company, Dave Gray (author of, among others, Gamestorming) argues that organising in terms of complex adaptive systems (instead of traditional hierarchical systems of organisation) will enable a business model more aimed at the specific wishes of a customer. Complex adaptive systems consist of separate units, having game rules for interacting with customers and other units within the company, without any strong guidance from the hierarchical top. A sample of such a complex system is OpenDesk, where customers, designers and workshops come together in a global marketplace. Such a system also allows the analysis of relations between partners and between partners and customers in the civic and the sharing economy, where different companies produce separately, only linked by service level agreements. While such organisations may not be optimal, they compensate by their adaptive capabilities. In his 2006 "Unit Operations", Ian Bogost argues that the same method can be used to analyse any type of media.

E

Economics

Economics is the social science that studies economic activity to gain an understanding of the processes that govern the production, distribution and ...

F

Failures

Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. Product failure ranges from ...

P

Prefigurative interventions

If we want to change the future, the big question is where to start. Are we going to try and develop the new operating system of our society; or are we going to show the possibilities of what the future could look like. Are we trying to get better at functioning in this world, or are we going to change the world we live in, thus being better at functioning in it. Within protest movements there’s a resurgence of a sort of directions called prefigurative interventions: “Prefigurative interventions are direct actions sited at the point of assumption — where beliefs are made and unmade, and the limits of the possible can be stretched. The goal of a prefigurative intervention is twofold: to offer a compelling glimpse of a possible, and better, future, and also — slyly or baldly — to point up the poverty of imagination of the world we actually do live in” (Andrew Boyd, Beautiful Trouble: a toolbox for revolution, p, 82). Occupy Wall Street, the encampments in Spain, Park(ing) Day, and Burning Man Festival, but also smaller examples such as the Reading Room or Granny’s Finest in Rotterdam are examples of direct action reacting to the world we live in, and trying out different ways of organizing our society, the institutions that make up our world and the way we create value. Prefigurative interventions are glimpses of a potential future. You might even call it the activist equivalent of the lean start up.