Andreas

I hope in part to demonstrate the feasibility of enhancing comprehension, and navigating complexity, using features uniquely dependent upon the riches and subtleties of artistic insight. The concern here is with the design of a flexible architecture to demonstrate how the power of both "scientific" and "artistic" approaches may be integrated to enhance comprehension and navigation of complexity -- as well as offering new forms of creativity in response to complex conditions.

It is no longer widely believed that society has the collective ability to organize collaborative projects of a scope capable of making the breakthroughs called for by current challenges. There is a suspicion that the challenge calls for quite another approach that makes greater, and more imaginative, use of the information tools that our society has created in order to counteract the tendency for collaboration to become tokenistic. Failing that, projects now run the significant risk of being undermined by dynamics with which many are already all too familiar.

The general concern here is that of obtaining an integrative perspective on any complex of social issues and potential responses, bearing in mind the need to zoom between levels of complexity and to effectively pan between different ordering systems. Issues of learning are then integral to any software specifications. Flexibility in reordering is fundamental -- in contrast to many systems based on somebody's "good idea at the time" (which later proves very costly to change in the light of new insights). There is a marked tendency for the replication of this kind of inadequate thinking in electronic conferences. There is every indication that there should instead be a heavy investment in moving towards what might be termed "conceptual scaffolding" that can facilitate higher orders of consensus -- using differences rather than becoming vulnerable to emergent differences.

A key question is whether valuable insights into complexity, vital to governance and self- governance of social processes, may only be representable and comprehensible through presentations of an essentially artistic nature. It is then their aesthetic properties that have valuable ordering and integrative functions. Given the well- demonstrated weaknesses of current international policy- making, it would be unwise to assume that this is not the case.

A more thorough treatment of what I am interested in and the intial constraints I have set in place can be found below:

More information answering the essential questions about the overall scope of my potential PhD work can be found in the current cartography of my emergent doctorate: