Participatory Inquiry, episode 135: User Flows

John Kellden

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8 min read

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Oct 7, 2017

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“In a network, social cognition is how we coordinate movement.”
@johnkellden

Now, go henceforth and transcript your social interaction, and sin no more. Thank you for being here, for reading, for participating.

Guy Taylor :
Until our gadgets become much more adaptive and accommodating of everyone’s unique personality issues they wont help much. They really need to be able to do deep profile with reliable predictive algorithms; guess we’ll have to wait.

Nora Bateson :
Warm data….

All the digital services turned separate apps have a subtle yet profound effect on how our minds coordinate movement. How we coordinate movement is related to how we extend our selfhood into being of service to others and the world. How we extend trust.

Note to self: outline a triple venn.

- warm data, vitae and symmathesy
- services architectures
- services, synthesis, selfhood, service

Stop Using Apps That Erode Your Social Cognition
Why? Because coordination of movement. We need to stop using apps that are detrimental to and/or impeding, eroding, our social cognition. How can we review, how would we know? It is perfectly possible to test this, all the way down to user flows through apps.

- Are you a user?
- Yes, I’m afraid so.
- No worries. What controlled substances are you using?
- I’m doing Tinder, FB and Instagram.
- That bad, eh?
- Yes, I’m afraid so.
- Again, no worries, there’s options…

User flow as a generative sequence
The user flow can be a generative sequence, co-evolving with social cognition, should we so design it. One of the characteristics of a generative sequence is structure preserving transformation. The structure that we need to preserve includes

symmathesy, warm data and vitae.

Otherwise we deplete ourselves by our every app “touchpoint”.

A Language Divided Cannot Social
The above points to an underlying need: reclaiming language. As of yet, language is split: academia, business, marketing, institutions,… It doesn’t have to remain so.

Guy Taylor :
We may need more focused reviews that specifically address our critical issues and we need points of access/aggregation/distribution to look over what fits our profile?

John Kellden :
Very much so. I have five years worth of warm data from the Conversation Community, from having showed up near daily there, with you and all others.

Living Thing
Our profile is a living, dynamic “thing”. I’m using thing very deliberately here in at least two different senses:

- thing as in object, an anchoring object for win-win-win habits and behaviors

- thing as in the old nordic gathering, a place where people come together in dialogue, and reach good decisions on issues that matters

Our social cognition, reclaimed, is what holds all our inquiry, all our discourse, all our complex responsive processes together. If we bring our own unique thing to the thing, our platforms turn place, our teams, businesses, communities and regions turn thriving.

social cognition or bust

Core Process: Decision Quality
The only user flow we need to start with when designing this, is decision quality. Decision quality at touchpoints, critical issues, steps throughout different user flows, points of access, attract, achieve (signal processing).

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
— Walt Whitman

Until A Patterning, Re-Aligning
All of the above can be happened, through design synthesis. We keep doing all these things, until a good enough set of patterns that connects, until an ongoing patterning of ourselves and our user flows, a patterning that realigns. At which point soon thereafter, there will be a short enough distance between map/model/theory and reality, including an experience similar to snap-to-grid: it will fit. In case you have been searching for a stopping rule for your choice, select wicked problems, this is it.

Are We Done Here? No. We Need To Don Our Fitness Gear
The fitness can then be ongoingly augmented, through the use of anchor objects. A bit like putting on gym shoes, for social cognition.

Social Cognition as a Service

Participatory Practice? Fieldtesting?
The Conversation Community started in Nov 2012, in something called Google+. It’s still there, kinda sorta. In Feb 2015, I noticed that the shared interest graph among us fellow plussers wasn’t happening, so I transplanted my thing, to FB, into the Conversation Community FaceBook, CCFB for short.

“THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,…”
— Walt Whitman

There’s 4600 loyal CCFB minions, doing my every bidding. Seriously though, no. What we are doing, is engaging in conversations. That’s it. Over time, I’ve picked up a thing or two, including some fieldtesting on pattern languages, one set of patterns which I’ve turned into a series of themed posts: Participatory Inquiry.

John Kellden :
The CCFB place, if you look at it just so, can be seen *as* an MVP. We just need to keep rediscovering, keep redeveloping, keep redeploying ourselves and our thing, to this here thing. Showing up.

Discovery, development and deployment by any other name would still be part, parcel and parsing co-evolving with participatory inquiry. The core process throughout the

discover, develop, deploy

generative sequence:

#decisionquality

Social Cognition MVP’s Of Our Own Making
Mastery is an intense reciprocation with reality. In a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people.

- How to access, attract and achieve (sweet comms, signal processing) in a way that co-evolves with social cognition and social interaction?
- Through language.

The language (including 170k patterns augmenting our social cognition) is the UI and the conversations that mind and matter is the UX.

“It will take great care to find our way through the trauma the incoherence of these times is unleashing. To learn to perceive aspects of life previously unnoticed, and to respond to the interdepencies that have been overlooked is to play with expressing things that have been unspoken, and to live in ways we have not lived before. Being more. Becoming more, for me, is reaching into possibilities of sensitivity to find unconsidered contexts and begin considering them in their complexity.”
— Nora Bateson

Any which sufficiently symmathetic comment thread, is indistinguishable from one building block of an MVP of our own making.

Cake or Death? The song of the phoebe-bird, please
Two of the things that we do, is experiencing reality and agree on what is some sort of consensus, experienced reality. Not absolutely contrary to, but at slightly oblique angles : reality does not equal “problem space”.

“There was a child went forth…”
— Walt Whitman

Reality Equals Infinite Play
The generative sequence:

1. Model reality
2. Infinite play
3. Context of mutuality and learning
4. Forces and building blocks: MVP’s of our desire lines, our lines of inquiry
5. Solution Spaces (nordic “thing” gathering)
6. Story (planet, people, play)
7. Problem Spaces ( often called “projects”; endeavours, journeys and adventures are better names )
1. Model reality (adjacent local optima)

These seven, understood as a whole, is the blueprint of a pattern. A blueprint of all patterns. Patterns of play, patterns that connect, patterning-realigning. Suffering is remaining confused where to move. Walt Whitman has already outlined where to move.

“There was a child went forth…”

Now and then, at serendipituous junctures along our adventures, we stumble upon fellow stumblerers.

John Kellden :
Ron, no rush, take care of things at home first and more beams ->>>>

Then, when you have a thought cycle to spare, look at this thread
and sit with it for a while.

There’s a possible generative sequence through the Content Transmogrifier,
that we might be able to align and fit with the above.

Ron Scroggin :
Ok good, will do

John Kellden :
Thanks.

Again, and all together now: how we coordinate our movement through all of the above outlined steps, *is* social cognition.

“O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things — All moving things, and the trees where I was born — the grains, plants, rivers;
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands, or through swamps;
Dear to me the…”
— Walt Whitman

Tracing Our Participatory Inquiry Until Aliveness
The difference is, we do have a place, right here, that allows us to move and to trace our movements. Through adopting using eg a participatory inquiry pattern language and related practices — we can do augmented social cognition. If you stop for a moment and reflect, this here very text, thread, is already an instantiation of augmented social cognition.

what’s with the 170k patterns of participatory inquiry?

The additional augmentation I’m suggesting with the patterns, is to weave between our human heuristics and a finite set algorithms, that can be fitted with a finite set patterns, a pattern language. Our user flows, augmented, can be leveraged and turned into a great many uses, one which is obviously related to our original purpose: coordinating ourselves in networks and coordinating networks.

coordinating networks

These here words in our text boxes, is a user flow. It’s social cognition turned transcript. It’s a thing. It’s the thing. Our own unique thing and our gathering thing, brought together. Lot’s of this already exists, is already extensively fieldtested. Social cognition, in addition to coordinating ourselves in networks, is also how we bring all these seemingly disparate processes together. All together now. Users. Cold Turkey. New Flows.

Reading: User Flows Spawning Whole New Worlds
User flows can be turned Whitman. Leaves of Grass reads like a whole, different operating system for user flows. Once we read it, we can turn it into things that work. There’s other books of course, eg T.S Eliot, The Waste Land. We probably need to do less of that one. Less Eliot, more Whitman, if you ask me. Or, we could do Doris Lessing, but her operating system is probably way to awesome to even begin to consider.

who, if I cried out, would come to my book corner?

Ask me about other books. No, seriously, I’ve a read a few. A really well-written book, can be seen as an app, an app where the user flows includes spawning a whole new world — to begin with, inside the mind of the writer and then, when reading the book, inside the mind of the reader and then, when writers and readers join together in a book corner, turning select, choice parts of this whole new world, into collective being: culture.

culture is more than two people engaging in joint reading

Can be a movie as well, a VR/AR-thing, a collection of well-designed apps, a platform turned convivial place. Once we’ve established some shared understanding around some of our fave books, we can begin to build a premise for how to best build and augment our social cognition.

beauty: nature of order

After we’ve got us a premise, we can proceed with questions.

What user flows through our partially shared
semiospheres, will co-evolve with coherence?

As a final reminder and a reward to all the brave readers who made it all the way down here, this very comment thread, is part, parcel and parsing, and, an instantiation of, one possible user flow.

This here post and the thread where it originated is an invitation to gather together and do differently, as well as do things differently, out of which we will gather our hearts and wits and all the necessary and sufficient resources, doing different things. No, seriously. Think about it. Ping me. FB chat or somesuch… my guesstimate for now is, I can stretch the invitation until January 2018 next year. Don’t fret if you read this later than that though — because social cognition. We might be able to squeeze you in somewhere.

We made it? What happened? We happened.

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