Some people are born with imagination - others less so. Nature, or nurture, provides one with a certain degree of control over The Imagination ( TI ). TI broadly refers to two sorts of things, or two aspects of a complex thing :
1. mutation : the ability to permutate, ( 1a ) abstract ideas using semantic handlers, or ( 1b ) concrete imagery in various sense modalities ( sight / sound / smell / etc. ).
2. conscious simulation : this is actually upstream from and facilitates 1b ... the capability to consciously appraise a sensory-spatio-temporal model inside one's brain, without receiving any corresponding stimulation from an objective source via the peripheral nervous system ( PNS ).
It turns out that "TI2" varies widely in people, and is a popular academic and party conversation topic. But today I want to write about how it applies to the design of built-environments.
## Your Friends Who Care About Prettiness
People with limited TI2 capabilities simply think about what their TI is able to trace, over the "live data stream" from their peripheral nervous system. If you change the inputs to their PNS, you have changed their mind. This sort of person is therefore more sensitive to their PNS - they are also the sorts who are emotionally affected by order and disorder in their PNS streams.
## Your Friends Who Apparently Care Less
People with greater TI2 capabilities are about to significantly modify their conscious experience, just by wishing it to be different. As with all other people, their brains have to trace over and process raw PNS streams in order to build data models of the world. However, with a greater capability to append, overlay, subtract, or otherwise modify sensory models, such people can literally "imagine away" a mess.
While the first type of person is forced to see the 0.5 degree non-conformity of a hung painting, the latter simply corrects this inside their own mind when they notice but choose not to let it concern them.
Therefore designers with superior TI2 capability need to dumb themselves down in order to actively design things that inconvenience users with inferior TI2 capabilities.
Thus, I reflect upon the need for me to improve my own design practice.
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