I’m always looking around for ways to describe the leap between two ideas (concepts, people, events, things) that occurs when you make a move in a Sembl game. On the game board, the ideas are shown as circles and the links as lines between them. In the case of the museum version, the “ideas” are […]
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner‘s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities gives us a fascinating look at the way the human mind weaves a world out of seemingly disparate elements — in a very similar manner to that in which the creative mind weaves an aha! out of seemingly disparate […]
What is the thing that lies behind the semblance of the thing? Virginia Woolf poses that question in her 1931 novel The Waves. Here’s the passage surrounding the question: ‘An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark. “Ah!” cried a woman to her lover, leaning […]
One thing connects with another — one thing resembles another, or is distinctly different from it, or overlaps with it, leads to it, contains it. There are many ways one thing and another can be connected, and people have been playing Sembl-like games, making connections on “boards” much like the Sembl boards that Cath illustrated […]
Consider the rhyme of womb with tomb It has the delicious property that these two words describe, if you will, the two chambers from which we enter this life and through which we leave it. Not only do the two words rhyme on the ear, in other words, they can also be said to rhyme […]
The essence of Sembl thinking is that you see resemblances — similarities, analogies, symmetries, echoes, metaphors, connections, kinships, links — between things, between ideas, between people. And you play them as moves in the game — you notate them, you score them. That’s the basis of the iPad or web-based Sembl game, it’s the basis […]
An essay woven of Sembl thinking: Gary Snyder, Han Shan, Dogen, Thoreau, Smokey & MIT… Gary Snyder is the fellow in the upper panel with the mountains behind him. Han Shan — whose name means Cold Mountain, which was also the name of the place he lived — is the fellow showing a poem to […]
We don’t really know how to think, yet. Or to put that in a more positive light: our characteristic ways of thinking are not yet as subtle and sophisticated as the problems that face us – as a global population, in our communities, in our business lives, our family situations, our own individual tangled and […]