"Context is to data what water is to a dolphin." ~ Dan Simmons
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
My architecture professor, Zbigniew Parandowski, always asked us, "tell me more about the context," when we nervously unrolled drafting paper to present our work. What is the context? Where are you planning to erect this structure? What is the relationship to the passage of the sun? Who will live in this building, and how is it oriented? How will people arrive at the site? Questions after questions. He was an incredible mentor, architect and photographer—kind, patient and full of surprises. For my Master's Degree—and I did it with a friend as a collaborative project—we designed a park, using trees as walls, seasons as floors and sky as the ceiling. It was not what a regular final project looked like, yet he agreed to work with us. In retrospect, I think the way we presented the physical and historical context in which our park was set offered some confidence in what we wanted to design. The result was pretty good - I was offered a job in the city planning department, which I instantly declined. I guess the context did not feel right.
In his book, The Great Code, Northrop Frye writes about his experience teaching English literature courses and how students who lack a solid understanding of the Bible could not truly engage in exploring works of John Milton or William Blake, often misinterpreting the intention or even the meaning. To solve this, Frye offered a Bible course to provide enough context to the English Literatures students, which proved very successful. Interestingly, once this new knowledge is obtained, it will move to the memory, where it could disappear with the rest of the bits of information. Or become a prominent feature if the neural pathways are used often enough. There is an older post from 2017 - The Skill Graph is like a neural network - it captures memories and guides potential. In this case, the context serves two purposes - it enriches our understanding of the concept that we are working on and, at the same time, provides a platform to share information with a larger group of people who share the same interest or who live in the same time/space.
Mark Alan Hewitt's book, Draw in Order to See - A Cognitive History of Architectural Design, presents a compelling argument for why and how architects use sketches to deliver ideas to their co-workers or peers and, above all, as the internal clarification of the thinking process.
“The brain cannot hold complex ideas in working memory for the duration of the design session, and must rely on drawings or other external memory aids to retain critical information.”
The sketch becomes "an affordance" for new thoughts. A waymark we can return to when the thinking process takes us off track—a personalized Ariadne's thread—helping to solve a complex problem. In addition, sketches often provided a context, expanding on the background information and providing a departure point for new thoughts. Canadian psychologist Merlin Donald argues that "virtually all pedagogic, artisanal, theoretical, and even narrative systems are bound together by what he calls the EXMF or External Memory Field, a part of the brain that processes loops between biological memory and external memory," writes Hewitt. Although the theory is speculative, it agrees with the observations of many design theorists. In other words, it gives us access to a much larger context.
For all of us at Ibbaka, context is everything. Through pricing engagements, we look for emotional, economic, and community value drivers. We expand our understanding by examining the larger context. To help with this complex task, we created the Ibbak Valio Platform, a true end-to-end Pricing and Customer Value Management solution. Context is also critical for Ibbaka Talio, a platform with two modules, Skill Profiles and Competency Modelling. In this case, the team or project becomes the context in which skill assessment occurs. The competency model starts as a sketch - a place holding complex information allowing the working memory to play with the skills, behaviours, tasks, jobs and roles where the model editor collaborates, expanding the model with each iteration. Although we have a library of articles written specifically to provide a larger context in which Ibbaka Talio operates, the best way to experience it is by requesting a demo.
