Nowadays it’s easy to prompt an AI to generate endless variations to approach a new topic of come up with (what seems like) new ideas. A tool to prompt my own thoughts and help me to think about a topic in new ways are – what I would call “lenses” (as a German I always picture a bag of lentils here). For example: Think about human-centered AI under the lense of “orientation” – what new perspectives does this bring up?
The idea was triggered by me and my husband listening to a discussion with Stacey Higginbotham who discussed the topic of IoT under the lense of consent.
I found a list or “lenses” in one of my old notebook and I can’t remember how I came up with them (it was way before ChatGPT times) but here they are to facilitate your own thinking.
- Orientation
- Flow
- Consent
- Gestalt
- Momentum
- Viscosity
- Social meaning
- Social relationship
- Order
- Space
- Emotion
- Rhythm
- Networks
- Gender
- Dissent
- Endogenic / Exogenic
- Magnetism
- Vibration
- Visibility
- Status
- Repetition
- Transparency
- Error
- Power
- Energy
- Impulse
- Symmetry
- Balance
- Radiation
- Particle / Wholeness
- Isolation
- Context
- Conciseness
- Salience
- Similarity
- Distance
- Continuity
- Fate
- Solidarity
- Variant
The list can go on indefinitely – as long as your brainpower and your curiosity to explore your own thoughts lasts. You may also feed this to your favorite LLM, but for me this is about training my brain to remain creative and come up with new thoughts.
Sabine Berghaus 