The Humane Representation of Thought

New representations of thought — written language, mathematical notation, information graphics, etc — have been responsible for some of the most significant leaps in the progress of civilization, by expanding humanity’s collectively-thinkable territory.

But at debilitating cost. These representations, having been invented for static media such as paper, tap into a small subset of human capabilities and neglect the rest. Knowledge work means sitting at a desk, interpreting and manipulating symbols. The human body is reduced to an eye staring at tiny rectangles and fingers on a pen or keyboard.

Like any severely unbalanced way of living, this is crippling to mind and body. But it is also enormously wasteful of the vast human potential. Human beings naturally have many powerful modes of thinking and understanding. Most are incompatible with static media. In a culture that has contorted itself around the limitations of marks on paper, these modes are undeveloped, unrecognized, or scorned.

We are now seeing the start of a dynamic medium. To a large extent, people today are using this medium merely to emulate and extend static representations from the era of paper, and to further constrain the ways in which the human body can interact with external representations of thought. But the dynamic medium offers the opportunity to deliberately invent a humane and empowering form of knowledge work. We can design dynamic representations which draw on the entire range of human capabilities — all senses, all forms of movement, all forms of understanding — instead of straining a few and atrophying the rest.

Related: The Utopian UI Architect link

Also related: Synaesthesia and embodied learning. Simone Gumtau and her colleagues at Portsmouth University have worked on creating an embodied learning environment for children on the autism spectrum. link

Also related: Montesorri's work with young children. Children between the ages of 4 and 6 use the Trinomial Cube as an introduction to algebra.

Forthcoming paper due this month - Williams, R., Gumtau, S. & Mackness, J. (Jan 2015). Synesthesia: from cross-modality to modality-free learning and knowledge. (Accepted for publication in Leonardo Journal html )

And it relates to Iain McGilchrist's work on the Divided Brain and his claim that our thinking / learning is left-hemisphere dominated and that we ignore the work of the right hemisphere (which takes a more holistic view of the world using all our senses) at our peril. See the-master-and-his-emissary