Terence E Rosenberg, Mike Waller Goldsmiths, University of London, Design Department, London, UNITED KINGDOM

1. Spatial Mapping Tools for Trans-disciplinary Group Innovation . InSciT2006 Conference T.Rosenberg and M.Waller Goldsmiths

6. 3) The evaluation space allows the collective to evaluate the ideas and the ideational process. It re-connects ideation to the brief and the ur-brief. It is a space which has different levels of access (the access to the iCE and its spaces is set by the collective, but as they wish may include a wide range of participants and stakeholders). 4) Archive: The archive space has an internal search engine allowing collectives to search through an organisations back catalogue of projects. It also provides possibility for connection beyond the organisation’s space. The internal search engine allows one to search out past projects but also features of projects. For instance one may wish to look for research in all projects on a particular user group and this search engine will allow one to do so. iCE Spaces

9. In the last fifty years we have witnessed an enormous change in the way we think and are/can be creative, linked to various epistemological constructions of the imagination – wrought through changes in the way we shape and live our lives; and particularly through the various technological prosthetics we produce to support us in this. The internet and the whole idea of an interconnected world has seeped into the very essence of thinking and imagining. The internet has influenced creativity not only in the fact that it is a useful tool for creative practice but also inasmuch as its’ very structure has permeated the way we think and imagine – affecting the structural core of our imaginations. Imaginaries of the Imagination

17. Backcasting one looks at a ‘tendency pattern’, as in forecasting, but makes a leap into the future and works the tendency backwards. Fore-projection one works from the past object, without deriving its changing forms between. One just brings it into a present and think how it may be ‘now’. Back-projection jumps back from a guessed future form to the present without reasoning the intervening forms. Thinking Beats

20. By contrast, the erratic leaps make connections across apparently unlikely areas for connection. A paradigm or syntagm shift are erratic connectors. In terms of the ‘prospect’ a paradigm shift would be where one considers one context as if another e.g. the domestic space as a circus (one would design for the home influenced by circus acts) . A syntagm shift is moving an ‘object’ from one context into another. For example thinking moving the domestic lamp onto the street to see what new thoughts this can stimulate with regard to street lighting. Thinking Flow, Steps and Leaps

23. The consumption space of most practice will contain the same generic features as those above, detailed, perhaps, differently in use. In all innovation, for instance, there is a thing innovated (event, system and in this case diagram ‘object’), there is a user/consumer/reader/operator of the innovation and a place (site) where the innovation will be used/consumed/read/operated. Similarly, the production space may be plotted. It will have the individual innovators avatars as features in the zone. It useful to have detailed in the map other features that influence production lying beyond the ‘innovators’ – production feeders - for instance, manufacturers, suppliers and others with investment in production of the ‘innovatory object’. The intermediary zone acts as a lens into which perceptual accents (changing how the look from one space to the other operates) may be dropped. These may be abstract concepts, political or ethical programmes, or other incidental references; any way of spicing and splicing (sp(l)icing) the producer’s and consumer’s zones. Loci of Practice

25. The plottings in space and time may also be brought to the map to animate thinking/imagining through and across the map. The imaginings may be communicated to others in the collective by tracing the vinculum of thought (strings) in the imagining. Members of groups or teams may enter each others imagining or indeed start imagining from the same inspiration triggers (loci on the map). An example of a thinking trace is presented alongsideindicated by the black connecting string. Prospecting The research may be buried (housed in database and linked to the map) in the features of the map.