Knowledge-Sharing Synergy

SOME NOTES FROM THE PUSHING-DOING GROUP - 6th July 2007

A Workshop on Knowledge and the Synergies within it

Knowledge-sharing synergies

• The Mappa Mundi (‘map of the world’) was similar to other (disposable) maps, created in 1290.
• It was a travel record as well as a representation of the Christian's faith (belief system).
• This is why it represented the earth as flat, complex and full of fantastical stories.
• It depicted ‘an imaginary being called a sciapod who shelters himself from the burning sun with one huge foot’.
• Although it seems like a practical guide for travellers it was created in England yet had Bethlehem at its centre.
• It offered (presumably first-hand, or second-hand) information about the elements and advice on areas to avoid.
• Knowledge-sharing is often integrated across many simultaneous levels. Here, traveller-safety mixed with devotion.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Entitled, 'Art, Truth & Politics'.
Pinter said: 'In 1958 I wrote the following: "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false…More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so…Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”

Experience

• Experience describes our practical contact and observations of facts and events.
• Sensations enable us to physically read or perceive the world around us.

When we touch, see, smell, feel, etc.. the neurons in the brain process these sensations so that we form perceptions and create concepts, ideas

• Knowledge is conventionally defined as the understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning
• Knowledge can also be understood as an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of less value
• The study or theory of knowledge is called epistemology
• Ontology is the branch of meta-physics concerned with the nature of being (Oxford English Dictionary)

Wholeness

• The quantum physicist and theorist David Bohm proposed the idea that as everything is interconnected, becoming, flowing, processing. (David Bohm, 1917 - 1992)
• ‘the nature of reality and consciousness create a coherent whole, never static or complete, but in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.’
• David Bohm in ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ proposes Knowledge as process rather than fixed fact or fixed truth
• 'By remaining alert to contradictions and sensitive to new relationships, thus permitting the growth of a fresh understanding, we can keep up with our contact with the world, and in some ways we can anticipate what is coming later.’ David Bohm, Special Theory of Relativity

The Pushing Doing Group

• The Pushing Doing group is highly process-orientated
• Its members tend to work with prototypes to generate solutions
• We work with knowledge-sharing in a 'hands on' way
• Sharing knowledge is a vital part of our decision-making process
• The architect, the planner, the engineer, the philosopher, the artist, the sociologist, and the economist
• All offer solutions centered around their own professional practice.
• How can we be (more) holistic in our approach, engaging the optimum configuration of disciplines appropriate for a particular project?

Tools for the Knowledge-Sharing workshop

• Scissors, cutters, card, straws, sticks, tracing paper, colours, square paper, tape, glue, brown paper, recyclable materials i.e bottles, cans, paint, skype, dictionary, receipe book

Knowledge Sharing example - 'The Pleasure of Treasure: A Hunt for Answers Around Kings Cross' A project devised by Artangel Interaction

My personal example - Landscape and Urban Planning Journal - Knowledge sharing across the disciplines

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