We talk about making connections…
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but what is it that actually “connects”?

Making Connections in life mysteriously needs to start and finish, and then perhaps establish a long sustained or a short relationship.  Often we don’t see quite what’s happening till it’s either all over, or has really begun to noticeably develop and notice the rapid rates of change.

Sometimes we have an ‘inkling’ that something is changing at the very beginning, before anything really observable is apparent, as if becoming aware of the ‘germination’ of the whole event with an initially very slow building of a “new pattern”.  It may be that intuiting “something changed” is experienced a bit like “feeling a change in the force” .   We may imagine foresight for things that don’t develop, of course, and learn to just be watchful and not jump to conclusions, but wait till a real pattern of proportional scales of accumulation are evident.    That’s ‘the pattern’ of systemic transformation.

What is perhaps the best indicator is always the “building process”, that as the illustration indicates is very much the same accelerating then decelerating accumulation of working parts.   It’s *not* a numerical process, but if you notice the scales of change changing scale it can help you locate what is really working.

The illustration is of course also about the connections between the natural system processes of building, and the learning processes of building, and the holistic design processes of building, that I hope to get to see emerging as a “connection”!   The PURPLSOC meeting “Elements”   and  PLoP meeting “Mining Living Quality”  papers on “Guiding patterns of Naturally Occurring Design“, are full of these stories, maybe too much to enjoy all at once till you get a feel for this unusual way of approaching the study of “how things work”.

You might try a novel way of reading, other than beginning to end.  One I often use with new books on unfamiliar topics is just “picking a few sentences at random” to see if they go anywhere for me, or trying the discussion topics at the end of sections or the whole work.    Today I’m writing this post to take a break from the long task of doing the final edit of the main papers, seeing a need to have ‘something’ new on RNS, having noticed some scratch notes for the illustration made a couple weeks ago I thought would be fun to work on.

jlh