In order to simplify my thought process for Mekwa and other services in the making, I have started thinking about them as simple tools. A hammer is a tool. Microsoft word is a tool (a little more complex, but its core functionality can still be achieved with a mechanical typewriter, or pen and paper).
Tools are created to fulfill a need: to interface between domains, allowing one to action upon the other. They have been our interface with reality, from the stone to mechanical, to microscopic machines and digital. In all this, tools are but interfaces between domains.
As we action the world around us with our bodies and all sorts of tools, we shape our identities. A dialogue where we shape the world and ourselves. So, what tools do I want/need to create or improve upon? The legos and a whole bunch of other tools have allowed me to poke at the world and shape my identity. Empowered have I become, now what will I create? hmmm.
As technology became increasingly microscopic, the digital revolution saw a lot of the mechanical tools of the middle ages, reinasaince and industrial revolution acquire a digital life, a digital interface. The typewriter became Microsoft Word...
Digital evolved its architecture and became more and more immersive. Stand alone pieces of code that once made up what seemed complex applications such as a text editor, saw themselves being used within even more complex tools such as blogs, which in turn became widespread within social networking sites... a lego like modularity became a recognizable trait in digital tools. Everything easily reproducible and improved upon.
Social networking sites are utilities that connect people via a whole range of internal tools. Most have a blogging tool included, photo gallery, status update, news... all separate tools that make up the SNS 'utility' and add to its value.
Some SNS have become so vast that their tools have created an environment where new tools are specifically created for that environment alone. A web within a web. Huge ships out at sea.
There was this period, web 2.0 where a whole bunch of digital tools appeared. Most failed. Most failed because they failed to understand the user's fundamental needs at the time, and instead tried to create new artificial needs.
Vast utilities such as myspace, because of their size and imerssiveness, are able to instill in their users new needs. You need to change you status update. You need to poke someone... But if you look closely they are not new needs. The need continues to be communication. What these tools allow, is simply different ways to fulfill the same primary need to communicate, to perform.
(...)
My little coloured kebab graph:
We now have some tools that have come from the past, having survived/evolved over successive generations, always bringing value to the user. Yes, some have become boring, take a text edit application, but their utility has meant they have been able to endure over time. The text editor is an interesting example, as a tool it goes from being a stand alone application to a feature in many applications...
In the end the graph is much more complex than the one presented here, because reality is multi-dimensional. I was thinking of open source in this context, of plants and trees and kebabs.
By building a tool in an open source platform, you are effectively allowing it to perpetuate itself, regardless. Its architecture is open. If it fails to bring value to its users, its code can still feed countles other apps that may in the end bring value to the greater good. Apps that are built and remain closed structures, when dying will not fertilise the soil around them. More importantly, they will drag the less conscious user with them in time, as they try and cash in on their slow synthetic death.
How do we go from this to more of a living architecture?
New ideas are usually fortuitous connections of existing concepts/ideas. We innovate by finding new connections between existing reality bites that most people are not connecting at the time. The creative process really is about deriving new connections that when turned into tools allow masses of people to drive in a new direction for a little while, until such time as new connections yield new tools that make a new direction more appealing.
If the architecture is not disclosed, the chance of re-combining components is hindered and one slows down the ability to innovate. The components within the pink circle, suppose they belong to Microsoft, will be disclosed to me only if I am a Microsoft employee. Outside users will just experience the pink circle, and for most users, admittedly, the pink circle is good enough. But for those who were brought up on lego it's not good enough.