Assignment 1 – Sophia

I think the H-LAM/T system Englebart describes, well-defined but general, is very helpful in thinking about how to approach the design of augmentation systems.  I also really liked his description of human intelligence:  “If we then ask ourselves where that intelligence is embodied, we are forced to concede that it is elusively distributed throughout a hierarchy of functional processes — a hierarchy whose foundation extends down into natural processes below the depth of our comprehension. If there is any one thing upon which this ‘intelligence depends’ it would seem to be organization.”

Building on this understanding of intelligence, he writes, “The important thing to appreciate here is that a direct new innovation in one particular capability can have far-reaching effects throughout the rest of your capability hierarchy. A change can propagate up through the capability hierarchy; higher-order capabilities that can utilize the initially changed capability can now reorganize to take special advantage of this change and of the intermediate higher-capability changes. A change can propagate down through the hierarchy as a result of new capabilities at the high level and modification possibilities latent in lower levels. These latent capabilities may previously have been unusable in the hierarchy and become usable because of the new capability at the higher level.”

I am interested in how we can augment our creative capabilities.  Reading about creativity, I haven’t yet found anything which describes the creative process in as useful a way as Englebart describes his framework.  In what ways would it be possible to augment certain portions of our creative process? Can different kinds of symbol manipulation through an AR system affect our abilities to manipulate concepts (conceptual blending or “aha moments”)? Perhaps a small change in the capability hierarchy would have a large impact on overall creativity, which is a higher-order capability.

Reading suggestion:  Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/)