Steven Johnson has a great piece in the New York Times Magazine today about Will Wright’s Spore. He writes about ‘zooming’ as the motif or our times — those moments when you switch scale radically but the patterns remain similar.
I first heard him talk about the idea at a talk he did for us at Demos last year. It struck me at the time that not only is it interesting but it’s also a really useful way of thinking about research. Unless you can spot patterns on multiple levels it’s unlikely that you’ve really got a handle on what’s going on.
