Ok so I am bit short on ideas at the moment. But after my last post and some work I nailed during the week… I got to thinking. How powerful are concepts in our lives?
A concept
Academic Peter Checkland coined the phrase, “a framework of ideas” to describe really what a concept is. I think in our lives there are all kinds of ideas we make use of on a daily basis. We have concepts of family, concepts of community, concepts of society and so on. A concept is really a set of ideas. Take the current media hype about petrol prices. We have a concept of crisis that’s framing those issues at the moment.
Using another concept to create tension
Let’s now express the problem as an opportunity. What opportunities could come from the high price of petrol? More ethanol, hydrogen? What about a new concept? What about teleportation? No need for fuel or even parking vouchers. Just zap and you are there. How about more working from home solutions… more flexible working hours… cars that run off water. Every crisis breeds opportunity!
The concepts of what we think stuff is
In life there are things we build up in our minds that tell us what stuff is. There are people, places and things that demand our conceptual attention. Say for example you are an upwardly mobile single person who is getting older and older. You have no partner and desperately want one. What’s your concept of the future? Do you see my point. Why not start thinking ‘opportunity’ instead of ‘crisis’.
So here we are for some reason talking about change of concepts. I am wondering if this blog would survive without commentaries… probably not. That said, this was an interesting post and as I wrote it I realised… I need to use better concepts of the future… at the very least!
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June 19th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
The anwer’s yes!
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What I don’t say there is: it’s not better concepts of the future you need, but concepts of a better future. Personally, I believe the less specific your vision of the future, the more fulfilling it will be. This is because “your” idea of the future is just a story you are making up about a state of affairs where “the wider you” is more generally satisfied. You could try having two quite specific, but somewhat different, concepts of the future. This gives your storyteller three interesting jobs to do: construct the two different stories, of course, and also construct a third (abstract? composite? true??!) story that underlies them both (Hegel rocks!).
June 21st, 2008 at 1:06 pm