Books
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Gaps between claims and results are more than abstract problems of fidelity, ethics, or philosophy.
When results are unverified by claims, the widening chasm between them is often filled with froth incapable of holding weight long-term. Future Imaginaries® helps individuals and creative practices identify and reduce gaps by concentrating on two things:
PRACTICE CONSULTING
Working with design practices to reduce the daylight between what they say they’re doing and what they actually do. My work with creative practices turns on relationships between stated intentions, working methods, and results, which are typically difficult to define, maintain, and assess. While most interventions focus on decisions, I concentrate on the observations out of which decisions are made.
AI SEMANTIC DIAGNOSTICS
Facilitating high-stakes individual AI operators' abilities to take greater control of LLM and AI outputs by focusing on effective semantic prompting, with meaning identified as the precondition of technique. AI guidance typically treats prompting as a syntactical problem; instead, I focus on linguistic and logical meaning as the primary observations preceding prompts. When technique is the aim, meaning attenuates, resulting in superficially better prompts that simply produce more convincing forms of AI slop.
MODUS
As representations of reality, claims exert demands on results. However, as the observable, concrete realm of experience, reality challenges claims with results, which either stand up or collapse. Consulting encounters are unscripted, situational, and dialogical. They are informed by negative dialectical processes, comprising truth-testing and falsification to shape defined, sustainable, and effective operations. Decades of observing systems, particularly the fracture points between what individuals and organisations say they are doing and what they actually do, inform my understanding of why the two so often diverge with destructive results.
LABORATORIES OF CONTINUOUS INVENTION
Future Imaginaries® builds on 10 years of architectural practice, followed by 30 years in academia, including 22 years at Newcastle University (as Reader in History and Theory of Architecture). The architecture school design studios I led as laboratories of continuous invention informed my research and publication. Ongoing pedagogical and organisational inquiries support my exploration of the relationship between stated intentions, actual operational conditions, and the outcomes they produce.
(Marco Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, Via 7, 1984, p. 24)
