Digital and PLACE

Have people must have invented a ‘hack,’ so learning all about systems is easier to translate?

There is a ‘hack’, and the ‘work around’ is very elegant. Most people in school are taught to learn is to memorize content, and also how to manipulate content. But it turns out, that educational process is not playing to our strengths. The human brain is not great at memory; but humans are exceptional at something very important, recognizing patterns.  

Pattern recognition was critical in the Hunter Gatherer Age. Imagine, moving from water to protection on the open savanah following an animal trail. A twig snaps ahead, and instantly, a step off the trail behind bushes is a matter of life or death, food or starvation. Knowing the pattern, what to do, matters.  

Humans recognize patterns, and beyond recognition, people can use pattern thinking to effectively interact in the environment (intervene) at the pattern level.  

Greg Satell, wrote an article on Forbes.com several years back entitled The Science of Patterns emphasizing how fundamental pattern recognition is. “Futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil considers pattern recognition in his recent book, How to Create A Mind, he argues that pattern recognition and intelligence are essentially the same thing. Expertise, in esence, is the familiarity of patterns of a specific field.

Today, pattern recognition is the basis of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and in creating distributed systems, and in other fields seeking an understanding of ‘wholeness.’ Patterns can be seen and understood in social codes, in the rhythms of music and the rhythms of time. Enzio Manzini in Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, shares a view from design, where design has morphed to encompass systems and creative processes. “One of the first steps must be to reposition the notion of resilience: to move it from a mainly defensive meaning (resilience as a necessity imposed by the risky times in which we live) to a more positive one: resilience as a deeper expression of the human character and, at the same time, as ground for a possible reconciliation between human beings and nature, between human beings and the irreducible complexity of our world.”

Satell quotes the famous mathematician of the last century, G.H. Hardy (numbers theory, mathematical analysis, Hardy-Weinberg principle a basic principle in population genetics). “Hardy once wrote that, ‘a mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.’ Today, as we increasingly live in a world of bits rather than a world of atoms, designing patterns is how we create value.”  News documentarist Lois Farfel Stark, in a TEDx talk turns her experience in news to the communications value of the image. She says, “images are the dominant language of our time. Visual processing takes up 30% of the brain’s function.” And this, “pattern recognition is a buzz word of our data processing age. Yet pattern recognition is what humans have always done, ordering the world through shape, from stone circles, to pyramids, to helices and networks.”  “So the trick of our time is to enlarge our lens, multiply perspectives, include opposites and when you do what looks like chaos becomes patterns, what looks like opposing forces becomes balanced and, the blur of accelerated change snaps to the beauty of the big picture.” The mental map, the map of networks are patterns of connection and flow

If patterns are this fundamental, this elegant, are they also used in fun?

Athletes that excel across a range of team sports share things like: athleticism, toughness, a competitive drive. But one skill, pattern recognition, sets a player apart and sets a ceiling on a player’s potential. This is why Drew Brees when he comes of the field, grabs an iPAD and studies the last set of plays. Brees was too short to play football, had an injury that was thought to be career ending, and holds many performance records in the NFL. And his skills (and character) are among the qualities that allowed  brown paper bag wearing Aints to became the always Superbowl contender New Orleans Saints. And this ability to see a way out provided inspiration for a city nearly washed away by Katrina. That’s fun, at least for Saints fans.  

Ernó Rubik, a sculptor and professor of architecture created the world’s top-selling puzzle game, and what is considered the world’s best-selling toy, the Rubik’s Cube. He had a hard time getting a company to pick it up. Toy manufacturers thought it was too hard, not childish enough. His response, in an interview posted online a few years back, “the cube proved that the public is much better than what they were expecting.” He goes on to explain that there are 43 quintillion possibilities, and that after he built the first cube it took him a month to solve it. Over more than 40 years Rubik says there have been hundreds of competitions. It’s not possible to reason how to solve the puzzle he says, but there are methods…but he says it will be hard to get under five seconds. In 2018 a 22 year old Aussie completed the puzzle in 4.22 seconds. As to puzzling the future, he has some thoughts