Personal Lexicon

Words, words, words.

Anticipant

An element of an interface that foreshadows what is about to happen if you take a certain action

Applied Science Fiction

See Design Fiction

Artifacting

Creating an artifact together, whether story, essay, video, etc.

Checklist Education

Teachers being required to teach “by the checklist” of curriculum that is set forth for them

Conductive Substrate

Factor that enables the formation of new connections and relationships within an overall group or community. Strong number of connections leads to strong community, but a conductive substrate leads to a resilient one. These can be the rituals, the places, events, moments of gathering, even the way a space is designed to bring us together.

See: L#20

Conflerge

Two concepts which appear opposed to each other yet work towards the same idea

Design Fiction

My approach to writing fiction to explore design spaces from a bottom-up, human-scale perspective. I also sometimes call this process Applied Science Fiction

Digital Body Language

The ability to non-verbally communicate, express yourself, or gesture in digital space. Often involves a virtual body or avatar. A digital body language does not have to exactly mirror the affordances we have in the real world and with our physical body, it only matters that it gives us the tools or multiple axes for expressing ourselves in different ways.

Expert Amnesia

The tendency for an expert to have built up such large chunks of knowledge that they forget the path they took to get there

Explorative Interfaces

Interfaces that give us the tools to explore large realms of data and discover new thought spaces

Failure Machines

Schools should be failure machines, they should be spaces where it is safe to try something new, and spaces where you can learn from your failures

Fractal Wayfinding

The idea that a city should ideally be made up of memorable places, both to serve as mental anchors and also to help build place identity—and that places need to be memorable at all scales from the small scale of buildings and streets to larger neighbourhoods and landmarks

Gateway Project

A project that feeds into many other projects

Imagination

Imagination is the ability to focus our attention on things that are not immediately present to our senses

Intimacy Gradient

The idea of public spaces branching off naturally into smaller and more intimate spaces, at both the community level and of an individual home

Margon

Metaphorical-jargon, a natural way of conveying complex ideas without being completely unintelligable to the outside ear. For example a “mental anchor”, or “reciprocal need”, much of the meaning is already embedded into the words it contains.

Reciprocal Need

The foundation of community, a community is formed and strengthened by having a reciprocal need for each other

Ruvurple

A state of flow so powerful that it spreads to the people around you

Solastalgia

Homesickness for the place you’re currently at

Thoughtspace

The collection of thoughts and frame of mind around a particular idea or phrase

Transition Space

A space that connects and serves to transition between two or more well-defined spaces. I think of these spaces not just as a physical transition but also a transition between frames of mind

See: City Fragments #3.1