Turning theory into practice is one of the hardest aspects of running a critical design studio. Having theoretical stand points and acting on them are two different things, easier to say what not to do than exemplify your beliefs through doing. We are working towards it thanks to the Critical Audit that Matt gave us a while back.
In that time I have always held in high regard The School of Life, in part due to it’s connection with Alain de Botton. Though in greater part, because it had a series of beliefs that it finds actual outlets for. Sermons, lessons, tours, feasts. All of the output is considered and consistent with their wider beliefs, which is not easy.
I went to one of the Utopian Feasts last Wednesday, where the menu expended a lot more time on the conversation we would be having, than on the food. A curated journey of discussion. The food was consciously all white, the idea being that conversation was the evenings colour. In my work with Innovation Unit we often facilitate discussion, and have very structured ways of taking them to conclusions. We typically use “tools” that are designed specifically for particular workshops, for example creating personnas to walk though the contact points of a remodelled council structure, or asking people to draw a specific role to express it in a different way. The challenges include making people confident that their ideas are valuable, keeping the conversations on track and turning discussion into outcomes.
The Utopian Feast was fun because we were a bunch of similarly minded people in a room, (in that sense it can’t fail) however I would have been excited to see how far our explorations into the Utopic society could have gone with a more structured facilitation. We were so worried about where we lived, what we believed and who had met AdB that we hardly had time to draw up new worlds. To be critical of the event, perhaps the ambition outreached the reality of middle class strangers in a room.
Regarding the School of Life as a whole though, the answer, or at least the next question, is in the name. How much is the school analogy a useful metaphor and how much is it actually a school? I think this is one of the bigger decisions in any design process, how much do you need to borrow the language of the existing, in justifying the new. The (up until recently) brilliant instagram wouldn’t have been anything if it didn’t build on the language of film photography and the history of analog image capture, and yet futures that restrict themselves with nowness are often berated. The School of Life’s skill comes from borrowing the language when needed, rather than burdening themselves with it. They live in a shop, they offer Sunday sermons and staff are faculty. It makes me want to clap.
Yesterday we released the third instalment of Paul’s Gamble. The web series is to be released in 12 weekly parts and explores the contentious nature of gambling.
(warning – spoilers below)
The General Idea
Paul McNicholl is a mate of PAN and our eponymous hero. He recently decided to quit smoking though not for the first time – he’s tried existing products and services to help, but hasn’t had that much success. Before starting this project Paul was typically smoking the equivalent of one pack/ 20 cigarettes a day, which works out as about seven or eight quid every 24 hours/ £250 a month. It’s this cost (being far more tangible than the health issues) that has really started to get to him.
When Paul said he was thinking of gambling his money rather than spending it on cigarettes, we got really excited and suggested the format. Paul liked the idea, probably because our involvement would give him a bit more motivation. Between us we decided to start during the difficult “third week” – when the cravings are supposed to be strongest.
Attitudes to Gambling
‘Gambling’ is a pretty divisive concept – frowned upon about as much as it’s practised. But despite criticisms of the gambling industry, the over-all idea of risk-taking is a critical part of life – both in daily decisions and the greater biological scheme of things.
As a pastime it’s about 40,000 years old and a textbook ‘meme’ in Richard Dawkins’ original sense – a concept that continues to abide even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit those that prescribe to it.
The reasons for cynicism towards gambling or ‘gaming’ can be unwrapped as follows:
If the odds are always stacked against the player (“the house always wins”) then choosing to gamble is illogical. A gambler could easily be accused of poor judgement.
Gambling provides the chance for an individual to profit purely through luck, and requires neither skill nor labour. In doing so it subverts our model of society – where the individual and the whole have a reciprocal relationship. It’s therefore often unpopular with the state, or ruling class and is portrayed (perhaps fairly) as corrupting – encouraging both greed and slothfulness. To be fair, this condemnation seems to go out of the window when it comes to state lotteries.
The psychological (if not financial) rewards of gambling can lead to addictive behaviour. Ludomania (problem gambling) is sometime compared with substance abuse disorders.
The Point of this Experiment
The rewards of taking a risk go beyond the potential prize. Win or lose, there is a guaranteed return on investment in the form of a rich experience. The learning aspect might sometimes be a tad weak-sauce (the roulette wheel finished on red… so therefore we know that sometimes the wheel will finish on red) but the emotional experience can be very strong – thrill, apprehension, shame, glory . The intensity of these feelings is proportional to the stake invested and the potential prize – not as fixed amounts, but as a fraction of the individuals resources (a millionaire and someone living below the poverty line would not feel the same about a £1000 game of Blackjack). The emotional journey is an example of a trajectory we previously described as Intervention Type #1 in a previous post, i.e. something with a beginning, middle and end – the decision, the anticipation and the result.
We believe that it doesn’t particularly matter experientially whether the individual wins or loses, so long as the outcome has an intensity. Paul is gambling instead of smoking – will his life be more enriched as a consequence? I don’t mean because of the health benefits either – but because of the relative intensity of emotion.
This is the moment when Paul realises that 1) His team have won the match, and 2) He has just won £200. Look at his face! That is a face expressing raw, powerful emotion. I envy Paul enormously for that moment in time. He has the fortune now of replaying this second in his mind (and on film) for the rest of his life.
In Summary
We got Paul trying a different activity in each episode because the richness of experience is dependent on novelty; returns diminish over time. If we were to organise ten days of roulette then by the end he would be no better off than he was smoking (again, health effects to one side).
Risk assessment is a naturally evolved process. All living things need to carefully manage their energy resources and so end up developing heuristic or instinctive systems to survive. Yes it’s true that if any creature adopts a behaviour that invests too much into risks with poor odds or low yields then it will perish. However, at the same time a risk-averse creature will fail to flourish – especially in a competitive environment. By stripping the extremes from the gene pool natural selection moderates risk-taking to an apt degree.
Seeing as risks are essentially ‘commitments to actions where the outcomes are uncertain’, and that ‘certainty’ is a fairly abstract idea, we can gather that risk-taking is also practically ubiquitous, even if the risks are marginal (quantum, even).
We’re not going to directly condone gambling – elements of it are cynical and exploitative. But when considered primarily as a form of entertainment, rather than an economic strategy, then it makes a lot more sense. If the stake is always considered to be a ticket – a variable price for an experience that scales to whatever the participant can afford – then there’s no reason why in the long-term any loss should be resented, or regretted.
Last week I made use of my first ever Groupon purchase – a one hour session in a floatation tank.
My understanding was that such experiences centre around sensory deprivation – no sight, no sound, no smell… the body is kept buoyant by a salt solution, heated to human body temperature, which nullifies the effects of gravity and creates a sensation of weightlessness.
The value of sensory deprivation is very interesting from a theoretical perspective. After all, if the theories we’re exploring suggest rich experiences are ultimately dependent on sensory input, and implicitly improved by greater intensity of sensation, then what would it mean to completely deny oneself of sensation as a route to experience? Can experiences be internalised? Would attempting to do so validate or invalidate our argument? Promotional literature for floatation therapy seems to suggest it is an enlightening, zen-like experience – placing the individual in a quasi-meditative state. It raises some fairly difficult issues regarding the experiential benefit of meditative thought. Obviously, this one-off event was always going to be novel in any case and would so be an enriching experience regardless of how little sensation was technically delivered – but are there long term experiential benefits to dedicating time to meditative thought (when time is such a precious commodity)?
Using the Floatation Tank
As it happened, the experience wasn’t a completely perfect case for analysis. Though it was more than adequate for it’s intended uses (relaxation, physiotherapy, catharsis) the tank did not truly deny all sensation – a tiny amount of light leaked in through the fixings, nearby traffic was just audible through the ear plugs, the water was slightly warmer than body temperature. Though this seems like nit-picking, there is a world of difference between fractional sensation and none whatsoever. In addition, this was the first time I’d done anything like floatation therapy so, as the instructor expected, it took (me) my mind quite a while to adjust to the change – I felt like my brain was urgently firing off a jumble of thoughts for the first quarter of an hour to compensate for the strange environment.
Having said all that I did, I think, get into a different mindset about half way through the hour. I felt calm, adjusted and numb. I lost track of time. The tension melted from postural muscles I didn’t realise I was knotting. A few joints had popped and snapped in very satisfying ways. My consciousness had exhausted it’s analysis of the context and was looking inwards.
I’ll be very honest with you. I actually felt incredibly contented. Not happy, necessarily, but just very comfortable with where I was. Doing nothing. The immediate future did not matter, nor did the world outside the water tank. Then inevitably the discussion I’d been having with Ben a few weeks ago percolated up through my subconscious. I remember we discussed what it means to limit oneself from interacting with the surrounding world. I realised I was (with no melodrama implied) closer to “death” than I’d ever been. That’s not to say I was in any real way close to dying, of course, but I was removed from existence as much as a rational and lucid mind could be – I had severed any real link with (weasel word) ‘reality’ and was inhabiting an abstract non-context.
I then did a very stupid thing and rubbed my eyes. My fingers were covered in the magnesium sulphate solution and it caused a fairly nasty stinging sensation I couldn’t escape from. It probably wouldn’t have been that bad normally but this was the only thing I could feel, which meant it was the only thing I could think about. I snapped out of any kind of state that I might have been in and was jerked back into reality. It was difficult from that point on to return to any kind of meditative or theta-level state.
The idea that pain can bring an individual from a state of detachment to feeling alive synchronises well with a ‘pure’ experiential viewpoint, which suggests that all sensations (good or bad) have a richness of value. However I was startled by a more sinister parallel – using pain to feel connected and alive is sometimes cited as one psychological explanation for self harm. This should be acknowledged, I feel, but it should also be noted that emotional detachment and sensory detachment are two very different fish kettles.
Conclusion
Research into sensory deprivation appears to show there are cognitive benefits associated with occasional use but as with anything, prolonging sessions provides diminishing returns, eventually becoming counter-productive.
Returning to the difficult question ‘is there an experiential value in meditation?’, the issue is clearly more than a little complex. Unfortunately I’ve not much personal experience to draw from, other than this isolated event.
There are many interpretations of what meditation means and what purpose it serves. A cynic might claim it is mostly a waste of time – certainly an individual engaged in meditation is ‘doing’ nothing, so how can it be seen to be productive?
Is this fair? We might say one of the many interpretations is that meditation is a process conducive for focused thought. If this were so, then perhaps yes, it could be perceived as experientially rich, because concentrated enquiry can help us to rationalise, conclude and review – to make knowledge from data.
Applications
Knowledge is a critical element of experience value. This implies that an appropriate meditative session should be undertaken soon after any experientially rich happening in order to help exploit the maximum experiential potential from it. If this were the case, how would that effect the closure of experience-services, such as the credits to a film, or the returning flight from a holiday?
Sensory deprivation can also be very useful when used in combination with any tele- or pseudo-sensory application. That is to say, if there is a desire to have an individual be completely immersed in a non-local experience then they should be sensationally divorced from their immediate context. Some culturally close-to-hand examples include the ubiquitous goo baths of Minority Report, The Matrix, BSG and Avatar.
goo baths – from various sci-fi sources
Another more tangible example is Auger & Loizeau’sIsophone – paired communication devices that ensures the individuals using them have each other’s undivided attention.
* – “Comfort” being a combination of 1) conditioning against trying new things, 2) repetitive routine, and 3) diminishing returns on similar experiences. Potentially also an incremental reduction of energy/ mobility due to ageing.
Sam and I recently discussed comfort and it’s impact on the way we live our lives; we are beginning a wider project that will explore it further. The recording was done to document our ideas and “possibly to share”, which has become “to share” (see below).
Today we launched This Is Why You’re Festive, a combined advent calendar and high-street sandwich review blog. Updates’ll be posted daily on @PAN_studio. The project leads on from some exploration we’ve been doing into experience and food. The premise is as follows:
“…For the grown adult sans offspring, the wonder and nostalgia of a childhood Christmas really only lives on through the tastes, sights and smells of a decent Christmas Dinner – a magical combination of sausages wrapped in bacon, cheese wrapped in bacon, roasties, sprouts and turkey.
Many supermarkets, coffee franchises and fast food establishments have cottoned on to this gustatory link to the past and have attempted to commodify it, portioning out festive joy in the form of pre-packaged, mayonnaise saturated turkey sandwiches.
Which begs the question: which off-the-shelf festive foodstuff best conjures up an authentic and sincere *Christmassy* feeling?”
What constitutes a “Christmassy feeling”?
Feeling “festive” (in the platonic sense) is obviously going to be subjective and varied. So to be a bit more specific – how do you describe that typical cocktail of emotions felt as a young (santa fearing) kid, in the west, in the run up to Christmas?
There are two parts – the anticipation, which starts around about the first of December (or after Guy Fawkes/ Thanksgiving) and builds until the frenzied insomnia of Christmas eve, and the climactic release on Christmas morning, with the opening of presents, chocolate, visiting of family, dinner and other rituals.
Arguably, the cocktail is greater than the sum of it’s parts: the “Christmas feeling” is a hybrid of excitement, anticipation, wonder, receipt of attention and family love and a faith in magic. It’s enforced by natural cues (darker nights, frost, fog, occasionally snow) and cultural ones (advertisements, decorations, school holidays, religious activity etc.). It’s difficult to imagine a parallel state of mind, it might as well be a discreet emotion in it’s own right.
Designing the Feeling of Christmas
It’s no wonder then that we make efforts to recreate this state as adults, even through the paltry gestures of packaged sandwiches. Unfortunately conditions change – the faith in magic is lost; expectations are lowered and tempered by the politics and etiquette of gift-giving; prolonged family interactions can cause stress; we worry about what we eat; social expectations must be met – there is an obligation to perform in certain ways.
It’s curious then, to imagine how an emotional state as powerful as a “Christmas feeling” could be authentically induced in adults. Not a rehash of jaded childhood values, but something adapted to subvert the socially matured and pragmatic mindset. Schmaltzy festive cinema does this to a small extent, but as a medium it’s hardly engaging enough to illicit a lasting effect.
It’s feasible an average commuting city worker might wear earphones between 5 and 12 hours a day. In some places they’re ubiquitous – on the train, in the office, on the high street – so much as to have become invisible.
This is fine of course – it’s not a criticism, just an observation. Personal experience reveals journeys are less stressful if the sound of a baby crying can be blocked; work is achieved more efficiently without the ambient distractions of an open-plan office.
But the observation does come with a hefty question in tow. It’s equally typical that the aforementioned worker might spend up to 15-16 hours a day looking at screens, but there is a significant difference: screens are not all encompassing. They can be looked away from, or around, and we can shut our eyes. Conversely, personal headphones are supposed to be all encompassing; they are supposed to override all ambient noise.
What does it mean then, to block out the world around you: to usurp an important link to one’s environment for so much of the time?
Context
The personal stereo is about 25 years old and has gone through multiple format changes. Significantly, the MP3 player massively opened up the potential for people to carry their “entire” music collections with them. Another (slightly overlooked) innovation has been Spotify for mobile, which allows someone to listen to any song they can call to mind from practically any location through their smartphone, 3G and ‘the cloud’. Even making allowances for licensing and signal strength, that’s an incredible thought isn’t it? Any song, any place, any time. From prehistory up until 150 years ago, the only way to hear music was to be in the same space as the instrument. There is an incredibly liberating cultural power that comes with the tech we now wield.
Voluntary Schism from Reality
To take a critical sensation like hearing and hack it’s primarily informative/exploratory role to instead supply entertainment will certainly have a significant effect on one’s perception of reality. Granted, ‘reality’ is a weasely, subjective term, but the choice will still affect an individual’s capacity to perceive their immediate environment. Critically, the user of earphones has made a choice: they are listening to what they want to, regardless of whether it’s what she should listen to. They have been granted the power to exert an amount of control on sensory input, and how they engage with their environment. Whether or not there is an experiential ‘compromise’ going on is contentious.
For example, consider a typical 40 minute train commute. Coincidently, 40 minutes is the approximate length of time of an average album. So within a week’s commute it might be possible to listen to roughly 10 new albums. Doing so would impart a constant, fairly rich supply of fresh experience. On the other hand, listening instead to the daily sounds of a train carriage would probably be emotionally and sensationally lacking, most of the time. However, occasionally the ambient noise of a journey might yield (experiential) gems: eavesdropping on an argument, a phone call or the ramblings of an alcoholic.
Most likely, the album-listening route would be more rewarding in the long term, and so within this context could be considered experientially condonable. But is this true beyond the commute?
Boundaries
Has society had time to adjust to the power of being able to limit depth of engagement with the physical world? Do we understand the point at which the benefit becomes a hurdle – when a delivery mechanism for experience becomes an obstacle? The thought first occurred to me when I saw a father carrying a toddler in his arms through a park. The father had white earphones hanging from his ears and a vacant expression. The kid was babbling and humming and blowing raspberries at his dad but he was completely oblivious. The sight, an abuse of technological power, made me instantly uncomfortable. The fact this man had wilfully placed a barrier between himself and his son, to the detriment of them both, made me incredibly angry, actually. In this instance it wasn’t strangers on the tube being phased out of attention but immediate family. It seemed wrong by every measure of quality.
I’ve also been amazed to see cyclists weave through traffic whilst listening to music. In my experience it seems necessary to dedicated every possible faculty to cycling in a built-up environment. Granted, there might be marginally more experiential value in cycling to music, but is the pay-off worth the risk of failing to identify peripheral hazards? After all, a premature death will reduce an individuals net lifetime experience acquired, quite drastically.
By Analogy
In a recent workshop we held at Goldsmith’s College, a design student ran a quick experiment to limit their exposure to unpleasant smells. They subverted their olfactory sense by keeping a perfumed cloth over their nose whilst walking through bad smelling places.
The student realised within a few hours that living with a single abstract ‘pleasant’ smell was less desirable than having access to countless neutral and unpleasant odours – odours which were still relevant and contextually grounded.
Earlier in the year I mentioned the potential of computer gaming and digital interaction in the future. Recently Channel 5’s The Gadget Show combined several state-of-the-art technologies to produce one particular vision of what this future might be. The build took 6 weeks, an unreleased copy of Battlefield 3 (a nice little PR coup there) and £500,000. The end result went on to be a bit of a prolific meme, and temporarily shot C5’s armchair-consumer review staple into the tech world’s periphery.
The package included:
A 9m wide 360° (X-Z plane) geodesic dome with 5 HD projectors
A roller-driven omni-directional treadmill (one of a kind, produced by MSE Weibull)
10 infra-red tracking cameras, synchronised with the players orientation by APS Events and Media
X-box kinect with infrared motion tracking, hacked by Running In The Halls for detecting player crouching and jumping
It looks like there might be some issue with looking and moving in the y-axis as the top of the geodesic dome is not projected onto. No doubt also there were many other issues that were deliberately overlooked, such as switching weapons, reloading, climbing ladders, etc. but it’s still a very convincing proof of concept model.
The above diagram illustrates the full breadth of the electro-magnetic spectrum, from tiny sub-atomic gamma rays to radio waves larger than the earth (there are in fact, no theoretical limits in either direction). That thin technicoloured band of ‘visible light’ is the only bit our human eyes can detect. That’s it. Our visual faculties are blinkered to a 400-800 Terahertz range. And from within these parameters we try as best we can to make sense of our universe.
There is no escaping the fact that our experience of the environment is limited by the capacity of our senses. Our visual, aural, haptic and olfactory systems respond to stimuli – they read “clues” from our environment – from which we piece together a limited interpretation of reality.
This limited faculty has suited us fine, to date. But it follows that if we can augment our senses, we can also increase our capacity for experience.
Seeing beyond visible light
Devices do already exist that can process EM sources into data that we can interpret: X-ray machines, UV filters, cargo scanners, black-lights, radar, MRI scanners, night-vision goggles and satellites all exploit EM waves of various frequencies to extend our perceptions. As do infrared thermographic cameras, as made popular by the Predator (1987).
What are the implications of para-light vision?
Let’s for one second ignore a canonical issue with the Predator films – that the aliens sort of had natural thermal vision anyway and pretend they can normally see visible light. Let’s also ignore the technical fact that the shots weren’t captured with a thermal imaging camera (they don’t work well in the rainforest, apparently). Let’s assume instead that we have a boxfresh false-colour infra-red system integrated into a headset, and that human eyes could use it. How effective would it be?
First of all, we’re talking about optical apparatus, something worn passively rather than a tool used actively (such as a camera, or scanner). The design needs special consideration. An x-ray scanner at an airport is an unwieldy piece of kit, but it can feed data to a monitor all day without diminishing the sensory capacity of the airport security staff that use it. They can always look away. If predator vision goggles were in use today, they would be burdened with a problem similar to military-grade “night-vision” goggles.
Predator Vision is not a true sensory augmentation in that it does not *actually* show radiating heat. Instead it piggy-backs off the visible-light capability of the eye and codifies heat emissions into an analogical form that can be made sense of: i.e. false-colour. In order to do so, a whole new competing layer of data must replace or lie above – and so interfere with – any visible light that is already being received.
Predator Vision in the home
For example, let’s task The Predator with a household chore. He must wash the dishes. The predator doesn’t have a dishwasher. There are two perceivable hazards: the first is scolding oneself with hot water, which Predator Vision can detect; the second is cutting oneself on a submerged kitchen knife, which only visible light can identify (assuming the washing up liquid isn’t too bubbly). Infra-red radiation cannot permeate the water’s surface. What is The Predator to do?
He would probably have to toggle between the two – viewing in IR first to get the correct water temperature, then visible light afterwards. But a user-experience specialist will tell you this is not ideal – switching between modes is jarring and inconvenient, and it also means the secondary sense can’t be used in anticipation. A careless Predator in the kitchen might still accidentally burn himself on a forgotten electric cooker ring. The two ideally want to be used in tandem.
What’s the solution?
It’s a tricky one. How can we augment our perception if any attempt to do so is going to compromise what we already have? Trying to relay too much information optically is going to cause too much noise to be decipherable (remember our ultimate goal is to have as much of the EM spectrum perceptible as possible, not just IR). This old TNG clip illustrates the point quite nicely:
Here Geordi claims that he has learned how to “select what I want and disregard the rest”. Given the masking effect of layering information, the ability to “learn” such a skill seems improbable. It seems as likely as, say, someone learning to read all the values from dozens of spreadsheets, overprinted onto one page. However, the idea of ‘selectivity’ is otherwise believable – we already have such a capacity of sorts. Our eyes are not like scanners, nor cameras. We don’t give equal worth to everything we see at once, but rather the brain focuses on what is likely to be salient. This is demonstrable with the following test:
It’s also worth noting the unconscious efforts our optical system makes to enhance visibility. Our irides contract or expand to control the amount of light entering our eyes, and the rod-cells in the retina adjust in low-light conditions to give us that certain degree of night-vision we notice after several minutes in the dark. The lenses of our eyes can be compressed to change their focal length. In other words the eye can calibrate itself autonomously, to an extent, and this should be remembered from a biomimetric perspective.
Option one:
The most immediate answer to para-light vision is a wearable, relatively non-invasive piece of headgear that works through the eye. In order to compensate for an all visible-light output, the headgear would need to work intelligently, with a sympathetic on-board computer. The full scope of this might be difficult to foresee here. Different frequencies of EM radiation might need to be weighted for likely importance – perhaps by default visible light would occupy 60% of total sight, 10% each for IR and UV, and 20% for the remaining wavelengths. A smart system could help make pre-emptive decisions for the viewer on what they might want to know, e.g. maybe only objects radiating heat above 55ºC would be shown to give off infra-red light (our temperature pain threshold). Or maybe different frequencies take over if primary sight is failing. Eye tracking could be used to help the intelligent system make sense of what the viewer is trying to see and respond accordingly. This might fix the toggling-between-modes issue raised earlier.
It’s interesting to wonder what it would mean to perceive radio-bands such as for wi-fi or RFID – obviously, it would be fascinating to observe them in effect, but might their pervasion be over-bearing? Perhaps the data could be presented non-literally, but processed and shown graphically/diagrammatically?
Option Two:
The second, more outlandish option is a cybernetic one. Imagine if new perceptions could be ported directly to the brain, without relying on pre-formed synaptic systems. Completely new senses. Perhaps existing parts of the brain could accept these ported senses. The phenomenon of synesthesia comes to mind, where stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Is it possible that in a similar vein the visual cortex could read non-optic information, and would that help us to see several types of information simultaneously but allow us to selectively choose which parts to focus on? If such a segue weren’t possible, would a neural implant bridge the gap?
In Summary
I’ve intentionally only discussed the EM scale here, but of course there are many other forms of data that can be visualised. There might be potential for augmenting vision with sonar, for example, or miscroscopy. Human-centric metadata deserves a whole post in it’s own right.
It’s difficult to predict how the potential for sensory augmentation will change, but whatever opportunities pioneering science unlocks can be followed up with tactical design consideration to make sure applications are appropriately effective and adoptable. It’s an exciting prospect to think that we may be on the threshold of viewing the world in new, never-before seen ways – and with this new vision there will be, inevitably, new points of inspiration and new ways of thinking.
