Brand Extension

Adam Greenfield reflects on Stewart Brand's keynote at the IA Summit:

"For the last several years, roughly since the publication of his magisterially funky "How Buidlings Learn," Brand has been thinking about time and adaptation. … Brand is trying to extend the way our culture understands time – encouraging us to think about how complex systems, very much including human ones like communities, socialities and arrangements of governance, adapt and evolve over deeper stretches of the long count … His talk today didn't depart wildly from these lines, so in that sense I suppose it was nothing new for anyone who's been following his last decade's output, but I never cease to be amazed by the power of physical presence. It was really gratifying, for example, to see Brand briefly summarize the shearing layer diagram from "How Buildings Learn" – something I know Jesse has picked up and run with – in front of an audience richly prepared to make practical use of its insights."

As Adam notes, Jesse has run with the shearing layer diagram too. As has Peter and Peter. As did I. As part of my Adaptive Design presentation (and therefore hidden in horrible .ppt – sorry), I toyed with the idea of mapping the different layers of Brand's original onto a web experience context i.e. enabling builders of user experiences to think of shearing layers within their systems, such that IA moves at a different pace to the CMS, or that the UI could break down into basic user tools, which move at a different pace to whatever the user has decided to personalise (and how), which moves slower again than the user's 'saved state'. All this was contextualised a bit more in person (there's some notes in the .ppt), but here's my diagram anyway:

v2: Brand Experience