Outflowing the Loop

Design activities emerge out of existing worldviews and affect the further development of worldviews out of which further design activities emerge. Within such loop, all of us tend to reproduce certain existing circumstances. What exists is the material we can work with and that can be creatively combined. By being conscious about this, we can choose what we reproduce and what not, but we can not free ourselves from the grounding in the existing. Loops can occur across scales and mark the mental frame within which individual and collective design activities are often trapped. Everything within a loop is imaginable through existing worldviews, everything outside is unimaginable out of those lenses. The outside is beyond what our mind is capable of constructing, because it did not receive inputs that would enable it. The material of unperceivable realities is simply not accessible for creative combination. Though, loops are not as closed as they seem and are rather filled with cracks that mark where worldviews begin to fall apart. From time to time we can slightly look through them and get glimpses into different worlds. Everyone perceives different cracks depending on its perspective. The question I would like to propose here is how can we become more sensitive for those cracks and enable the flowing through them so that they increase their scope? What are the capabilities needed to identify cracks? What could be sensing approaches that enable the outflow of tiny parts to entire forms of existence. I belief there is something out there, something that is beyond what is imaginable for many of us. Cracks in existing loops might give us a hint of what could be beyond existing worldviews, but we need to be able to sense them in order to enable flows through them. People who always moved at the margins of loops might be the ones with the needed perspective to guide such exploration processes. They see cracks others do not sense.

Apr 17, 2025