Between Mind and Models: Iterative Interaction as Knowledge Building

Models have the potential to be extremely useful if we perceive them like any tool: not to be embraced dogmatically, or superfluously disregarded. Models, whatever their medium, are materiality that serve as a medium towards an end.

Our brain can only hold so much in mind and models amplify our capacity to consider quality of thought in mind. It enables us to “tinker”. They are simply extensions of the contents of our mind and act as provocations to conversations — evolving the superficial to higher orders of reasoning and understanding about a particular focus.

There’s two core constituents that make models work:

1) Material: In order to make anything real, you have to pour it from your mind into something; to make it tangible. I believed for a time that this was the most pure form of expression.
2) Mind: The model is only as good as the concept and contents that are in mind, and arguably, “concept” is the most real thing there is — it’s the “model” that doesn’t measure up to what’s in mind; it’s a failure of the crafting of the model, or the limitations of the material to fully express the intent.

I’ve come to find; it’s a matter of the interaction between the two. For it is the problem of difference that paves the way for progress. Nothing can be translated verbatim, mind and matter will never align completely. A tree is only a tree. The letters T-R-E-E, nor the image you hold in mind when I you see the word TREE is not a tree either but symbols of the tree; useful proxies for the tree in absence of it. This is the brilliance of the human mind; abstraction (yet, we must be careful. matters can go awry when we conflate the symbol with the thing). It’s the very nature of difference that allows for the interaction between Mind and Material (in this case, models) that in turn produces an emergent synthesis and higher order thinking — and so the fly wheel continues to accelerate. This brings us to the challenge of creating conditions that optimally facilitate a high quality conversation between minds and matter in service of ever more complete comprehension and understanding; however little that may be in actuality.

In short, mind feeds matter and matter feeds mind. Models are a type of material that represents “our understanding of the thing as of now” which in turn serves as fodder to remix, construct, poke, probe and prod. The process of interaction enables us to reach just beyond what we currently know — just like a metaphor.

This is why research, prototyping and rapid iteration are key to design praxis; it accelerates the conversation between minds and matters. They are techniques that reach ever so slightly beyond what it currently knows and compounds it over time to quickly accelerate the scope, focus, range, specificity, possibility, opportunity and articulation of things as we perceive them to be and our conception of how they might be different.