Reflection : Domain Axes, Valued Goals

I guess everyone who isn't just dead, competes along some axis of their interest. Most people pick axes like "professional employment", "the love of friends and family", "sporting leagues", etc. Having a bit of a red ocean aversion, my risk management strategy over the past few decades has generally been to avoid anything that most people are hot about. I suppose if I had to describe my strategic directions along axes of my competitive interest, they would be something like :

- in a room, be a less remembered person 

- in a room, don't be the least lethal 

- in a market, have some movement capability

- in a market, have the most comprehensive understanding

- in a domain of knowledge, don't know nothing about it

- in a society, don't depend on it

- in a society, be ready to be destroyed by it

The Love and Care of Animals

 I think about how I like working in the hospitality industry. Hospitality is the simplest way to pass time, requiring only a lazy and stupid disposition. It requires little more than to care for animals whose thoughts rarely venture beyond family, food, and pleasures of the flesh. That has shaped my time in commerce significantly. I chose a lazy industry. At some point, I shall have to pivot to industries which orientate themselves about things like making money out of money. But the problem then is, at the end of the day if you dig down to it ... the people who enjoy making money out of money don't hire other people to do it for them, as much as they like to do it by themselves. In fact the sort of people who hire people to make money for them, typically spend their money in the hospitality industry - so there is no running from animals, they are everywhere. What do we do? I am still considering the rest of my life and career. I always hope it will be trivial, and short, but here we are ... continuing, to wonder about tomorrow. What to do?

Always design for imbeciles

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.