What do cats, boxes and innovation have in common?
Whenever humanity talks about a crisis it typically has a theme: climate crisis, financial crisis, hunger crisis, dot-com crisis, public health etc.
We naturally put the crisis in a box. It’s easier to interpret. A financial crisis is easier to deliver as a message to the public (and to ourselves) than a crisis of multiple industries, or greater yet — designs and systems. This is by no means a doomsday article, it is a call for a more holistic approach inspired by thinkers that have interwoven multi-disciplinary frameworks to their works.
The coronavirus pandemic is indeed a health crisis, but it is also significantly more than that. It has created shocks outside of its health box. It is changing the way we approach healthcare, but also the way we approach work, education, politics, travel, entertainment, and that’s just the beginning.
Da Vinci was on to something
A polymath and deeply curious individual with a holistic approach that combined art and science. Da Vinci’s artistic view intertwined with his scientific view to create outlandish ideas (all great inventors are a little dreamers are they not?). The brilliant part of all this is that he could not only come up with outlandish ideas, but also create and build them. This borderless intertwining of art and science led Da Vinci to a breathtakingly broad set of skills and domains.
Even though we inherently know that everything is connected to everything, we generally try to isolate and categorize . This craving for divide-and-rule approach recognised by French psychologist Jean Piaget. A term he coined “schema”, a mental recipe to cope with complexity. But this has gotten to a point where we categorize crises into boxes, although they never are and are never not complex.
Imagine our current cities as landscapes, or more specifically as a canvas. Within this vast canvas lie a number of boxes — a box for health, a box for education, for work, for arts and the remaining boxes that comprise a modern city. When today’s health crisis hit, we naturally labeled it a health box crisis; little did we know not only was it not a specific box it was the whole canvas and everything laying on top of it.
The canvas can also be redefined as the urban environment. The city, or specifically the Living City. A term we have been using at Fresco Capital to signify that a city isn’t just a static landscape or boxes with cats in them but an evolving body that is similar to other living entities — it needs to constantly grow and evolve.
Ibn Sino: Polymathy for 2020
In the next section we will discuss an equally unique and brilliant thinker — Abu Ali Ibn Sino or also known as Avicenna. Ibn Sino was a polymath, a person of comprehensive knowledge and learning. The irony and brilliance of Ibn Sino is that although he was a physician by trade, he also was a philosopher (although neither of those professions existed in the way we see them today; universities didn’t exist — Madrassas did. General hospitals existed, but Sino wasn’t at a hospital). He combined his depth of knowledge from both fields to create one of the most impactful works in the field of medicine, Al-Qanun Fi at Tibb (The Canon of Medicine). Amongst many firsts he researched, was a very current methodology in fighting pandemics — quarantining. Ibn Sino had an eerily similar (to Da Vinci) view of his craft intertwining with art: he said about health:
…In other words, it is the art whereby health is concerned and the art by which it is restored after being lost.
Yet the art was grounded in fundamental science:
Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the body; in health, when not in health; the means by which health is likely to be lost; and, when lost, is likely to be restored
What I’d like to raise is an altogether separate design and approach of knowledge practiced and inspired by Ibn Sino and Da Vinci. A design where science, philosophy and art were not separate boxes — categorically differentiated, professionalised, turned into disciplinary specialisation and fragmented.
By now you are probably thinking, why is a tech venture investor going on and on about medieval thinkers and knowledge designs? After all, the world we live in today is vastly different to the world from these individuals, and their respective eras. The world today has become a techno-enabled society — 2/3rds of the world is online, Moore’s Law is almost infallible, data is growing exponentially, magnified by the scale and performance of the cloud and now Artificial Intelligence.
Upgrading human comprehension
Not only do we have to understand that there are trends that are pushing both the various factors in what we call people — age, consumption, culture, etc. But technology is taking off at an ever accelerating pace. In order to keep up, we need to upgrade our knowledge designs and human comprehension.
Da Vinci and Ibn Sino can be the inspiration behind a new and upgraded framework.
The Coronavirus pandemic has forced us to rethink our cities, our societies and industries. Being digital or enabling remote work is not about simply shifting in-person meetings to Zoom meetings, or changing office chit-chat to Slack, conferences to webinars, and trade-shows to e-tradeshows. There needs to be a rethinking of how we work.
This also includes rethinking many other industries. Amongst them — healthcare. Developing telemedicine is a great step, but we have seen 10 years worth regulatory change happen in 2 weeks. There are more and more opportunities to rethink how healthcare as a whole is delivered. Making it more preventative and not just reactive.
Thinking outside of the box
Tying this back to canvases, boxes and cats. I believe that there is a prime opportunity to upgrade our canvases or in other words — our cities (for now). Cities are urban bodies that hold so many different physical realities for society, but the proliferation of aforementioned technology for the past 30 years has put a lot of pressure on them to keep up. The pandemic of 2020, was not a black swan event but rather an event that could (should) have been anticipated.
Unfortunately today, the designs we have built have led to optimisations that are based on “categorisation” and fetishisation of specialisation. At core a different epistemological schema in which science and philosophy (or for that matter any domain) are not so categorically differentiated, professionalised, turned into cats in boxes with no overlaps or intersections with each other.
Realising we don’t have all the answers is a critical set in the foundation of designing and innovating in today’s environment. Therefore knowledge systems are critical. The 2nd piece of this foundation is to realise that everything is connected to everything. Any single piece of technology within a vertical can affect businesses that are in completely different sectors — how far and wide these ramifications are to be seen.
