Uncovering Temporal Myopia: How Our View of Curiosity Needs a Third Dimension
Exploring how time and systemic dynamics reshape our understanding of curiosity.
In my previous article (Part 3), we explored what it might mean to imagine curiosity as infrastructure. I shared the development of a visual tool used to map different patterns of how curiosity is enacted. This considered both its foundational approach (infrastructured vs. operationalised) and its intentional posture (futures-oriented vs. procedurally enacted).
This matrix helped me critically examine existing practices and highlight how even well-intentioned efforts can fall short without a deep systemic and intentional grounding.
Still, working with just a 2x2 framework, thequestion nagged at me: how to truly convey the dimension of time, especially change over time.
This struck me as fundamental to curiosity’s systemic potential. Curiosity isn’t static; it unfolds. It’s shaped by systems and can, in turn, shape them.
This struggle to represent time in my model led to a broader realisation about the field itself: my exploration revealed what I believe is a significant blind spot — a pervasive temporal myopia in how we think about, write about and cultivate curiosity.
The Temporal Myopia in Curiosity Discourse
Most discussions and models of curiosity operate within immediate or short-term timeframes, missing how curiosity might interact with and transform systems over longer durations.
This myopia isn’t trivial — if curiosity has the potential to be a genuine force for systemic change, then understanding its long-term dynamics and impact is fundamental.
This myopia manifests as:
- Short-Term Focus: Discussions and models frequently operate within immediate timeframes, concentrating on current states, immediate triggers, or near-future individual/organisational benefits.
- Lack of Foresight: There’s an absence of deep consideration for how curiosity, especially if systemically nurtured or infrastructured, might interact with and change systems over longer durations. Its potential to contribute to long-term adaptation, resilience, or transformation remains largely unaddressed.
This temporal myopia felt critical. As scholars of anticipation note, deeper systemic layers have longer “characteristic timeframes for change,” and understanding these provides for a longer “casting forward” of dynamics into the future (. Similarly, design-enabled structural changes, especially those that become infrastructure, can exert influence over decades or centuries, highlighting the long-term nature of systemic impact:
Design decisions compound over time: established versus new housing estates (top) sand treet widening versus walkable neighborhoods (bottom) and show how today’s infrastructure shapes tomorrow’s lived experience.
This insight directly challenged the adequacy of a purely 2D map.
To capture this dynamic, temporal quality, the concept of a third dimension began to emerge: an Integral Horizon.
This wasn’t about a simple, linear progression upwards to a “better” state.
It was an attempt to visualise a dynamic, curving trajectory, representing how different patterns of curiosity enactment might contribute to ongoing, emergent change within a complex temporal field.
The breakthrough came while idly building with LEGO:
This evolving 3D model, the Three-Dimensional Curiosity Matrix, became the generative probe for engaging in practice-based design and dialogue with practitioners.
Its specific purpose was to explore this dimension of temporality and its implications, capturing curiosity’s dynamic unfolding:
One way this 3D model served as a generative probe was using it playfully to explore various frameworks, imagining what their trajectories across might be should a systemic posture be held when enacting these practices.
Liberating Structures: From Isolated Prototype to Situated Futures
Here, I explored Liberating Structures, a collection of “microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust” in group settings, such as facilitated sessions. Starting as an isolated prototype, with founders Henri and Keith iteratively testing hunches, situated in the Operationalised and Futures-Oriented quadrant.
Their journey towards the ‘integral horizon’ unfolds as these structures achieved wider adoption, becoming more infrastructured — regularly yet adaptively enacted within diverse communities.
When their use transitions from novel, one-off applications to becoming embedded components of how groups regularly engage, they start to shape collective inquiry and action over time. As these structures are repeatedly utilised, adapted, and their impacts compound, they contribute to the cumulative development of a group’s capacity for futures-oriented thinking and co-creation. The ‘integral horizon’ in my model then visualises this evolving trajectory — the system’s increasing capacity for generative dialogue and adaptive change, a capacity that the sustained and reflective use of Liberating Structures helps to cultivate across longer durations.
What if the arc broke?
Had Liberating Structures not been taken up, adapted, and sustained by communities of practice, they might have remained a clever facilitation technique — useful but isolated. Without ongoing enactment and collective sensemaking, their systemic potential could have stalled, becoming novelty or managerial appropriation. Rather than cultivating capacity for distributed agency and futures literacy, the structures might have become tools of performative participation — curiosity curtailed by convenience.
Systematic Curiosity: From Methodical Practice to Instrumentalised Output?
The Systematic Curiosity framework offers a deliberate, methodical practice for cultivating curiosity as a repeatable skill, aimed at personal growth and sustained reflection. Drawing from the experimental cycle, it invites individuals to explore experience, identify patterns, and test assumptions, with the goal of enhancing wellbeing across personal and professional domains. The author has published a book based on her research, Tiny Experiments (I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend the audiobook, read by Anne-Laure herself).
Given its structured nature, I initially placed this model in the Operationalised — Procedurally Enacted quadrant (Template Thinking). However, the framework’s intended applications, such as expressing gratitude, identifying flourishing, or imagining preferred futures, clearly aim beyond mere routine, suggesting a potential trajectory towards Situated Futures if enacted with systemic posture.
What if the arc held?
Held with the posture of systemic curiosity, might Systematic Curiosity contribute to a bigger shift? Could the practice produce a cumulative, reflective capacity for attending to complexity over time? As it becomes a sustained habit, it might scaffold a group or culture’s ability to engage with uncertainty, reframe habitual patterns, and orient toward more purposeful futures.
In this imagined trajectory, the practice bends toward the integral horizon — becoming a subtle infrastructure of attention.
What if the potential is captured?
But the same operational clarity that gives this model traction also makes it vulnerable to co-optation.
In organisational settings, curiosity is often promoted as a productivity strategy — part of a “curiosity economy” that rewards inquiry only when it serves growth, efficiency, or innovation, as described in The Politics of Curiosity. When deployed within systems governed by commercial interests, Systematic Curiosity risks being instrumentalised. Its emphasis on structured inquiry may be reduced to yet another method for unlocking value. In a worse-case scenario, I imagined employees being measured against curiosity KPIs, assessed against their production of commercialisable output!
As Curiosity Studies warns, “neoliberal curiosity” prizes novelty over nuance, solution over sensing. Without intentional care, even reflective practices can be dragged into anti-curiosity by the **systems they might otherwise help transform. In this context, Systematic Curiosity might remain a productive tool, but one where the radical potential of curiosity is left unrealised and it’s capacity to support equitable or emergent futures is prematurely closed.
This transition to a 3D temporal-systemic matrix echoes the broader scholarly move, particularly within Curiosity Studies, towards understanding curiosity not as a static, isolated trait, but as a dynamic, relational, and political practice deeply embedded within and influencing complex systems.
Problematising, Rather Than Solutioning: The Ongoing Inquiry
Developing this concept of systemic curiosity continued to surface challenging questions: How might infrastructured curiosity reinforce existing power structures? How would we discern “healthy” curiosity infrastructures, and who would decide? What if they “worked” too well, leading to new challenges?
My career, rooted in boundary-spanning work, had often demanded rapid sense-making and satisficing solutions. Going into this research, however, I made a deliberate commitment to challenge that habit. I chose to, borrowing from Donna Haraway, stay with the trouble — to dwell in the questions and complexities rather than rushing to formulate another framework or neat set of answers.
This shift in posture feels significant. It speaks to the kind of designer I am becoming, my comfort with ambiguity, and a focus on deep understanding rather than “close enough!”.
Locating and Defining Systemic Curiosity
While curiosity studies increasingly recognises curiosity as multidimensional and cultivable, my survey of literature for this project — spanning academic texts to business and productivity blogs — found the predominant focus remained on psychological or behavioural aspects.
My work on systemic curiosity seeks to build upon these foundations, but relocates curiosity into the infrastructural, relational, and temporal fields where it is shaped and enacted.
It’s an attempt to attend not just to how curiosity feels or behaves in an individual, but to how it is permitted, constrained, ritualised, or even refused within the intricate weave of complex systems.
Through this research, my understanding of systemic curiosity evolved, presently defined as:
A relational and temporally situated posture of inquiry that emerges within complex systems, not to resolve them, but to remain in ethical relation with their tensions, contradictions, and trajectories.
It does not presume universal access to all knowledge, nor the inherent legitimacy of all questioning. Instead, it prompts inquiry into how curiosity is enabled, constrained, or refused by the infrastructural and cultural patterns that shape systems over time.
Systemic curiosity is engaged as a posture, staying with what cannot be fully known, holding complexity without flattening it, sensing without necessarily needing to own or control, and imagining change without dictating its precise form. This approach moves away from seeing it as a tool for achieving some totalising vision.
This horizon is termed ‘integral’ because it actively stretches our understanding of curiosity. It orients us towards accountability, towards futures beyond our immediate grasp, and towards relationships that require tending rather than simple mapping. The ‘integral’ quality here isn’t about achieving a finite completion, but about this continuous, expansive orientation.
In practical terms, this means recognising that our curiosity doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It’s shaped by our relationships and connections — the relational — and both when we become curious and how long we sustain that inquiry influence what we learn and how systems might change — the temporality.
Ultimately, it’s less about a fleeting spark and more about an ongoing, ethically-aware way of engaging with the world’s complexities.
What I’m Learning About Being a Designer
Through this research, I’ve begun to answer that question about my designer identity.
I am a designer, but not in the way I initially imagined.
My practice isn’t about creating artefacts or interfaces. It’s about designing the conditions for inquiry itself.
This research is about infrastructuring curiosity in systems that desperately need it, systems often marked by ingrained inequities where dominant voices can mask agendas of exclusion, requiring careful treading and sensing.
This means my design practice is also about ‘designing conditions for’.
Which resonates with my growing comfort in thinking of myself as a bit of an ‘architect’ whose work is located in business and experience design.
This research has taught me that staying with questions, rather than rushing to solutions, is itself a form of design practice. It’s taught me that my discomfort with traditional boundaries isn’t a limitation, it’s what has enabled me to see patterns others might miss.
Embodied Curiosity: Sensing Before Knowing
As I work through the final weeks of my Master of Design Futures, preparing research findings and detailing how these ideas evolved through interviews into the ‘Tension Field Model,’ this practice of writing becomes integral to my synthesis.
These posts are an experiment in articulating evolving ideas. I find myself cautiously curious about your responses, as one always is when sharing emerging work with the world.
This process of posting, and reflecting on any engagement, is itself a form of reflexivity on my own practice, helping me build confidence in working and thinking out loud in this space.
So, before we delve into the next article, I’ll pause here with an image created with AI assistance that attempts to depict my own curiosity formation process:
For me, curiosity begins with a felt sense in the solar plexus, an embodied knowing that precedes cognitive understanding. This aligns with perspectives on curiosity that involve sensing at the edges and “in-between” spaces, connecting to what I’m exploring as relational curiosity and “edgework” — connections and boundaries rather than isolated information. My curiosity then extends to the knowledge network, seeking understanding by traversing webs of ideas, relations and information across multiple domains. This unfolds long before my mind fully catches up. The more I read on systems sensing and the practice of systemic constellations, the more I understand the many non-cognitive forms of knowing.
This embodied approach to curiosity is particularly relevant to awareness-based systems change, which values forms of knowing beyond the purely rational. The image serves as a way to externalise and make visible this internal, complex process of reflection and sense-making. (I’m tempted to get this printed as a sticker!)
There is more to come soon, and so much more in the network I seek to explore — thank goodness for constraints and deadlines!
In the meantime, stay curious, stay connected.
This research forms part of my studies in the Master of Design Futures at RMIT University.
Author’s Note: This article shares my original research, personal reflections, and insights. AI tools were used in its editing and structural development, helping to clarify, refine, and amplify my narrative.
Works Consulted
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