For many years, Leverage never focused on aesthetics. Different people tried to decorate things at different times (e.g., some staff at the Lake Merritt building in Oakland), but for the most part, walls were blank and documents were made of bullet points.
We graduated from bullet points to prose, then to prose with images, then to documents that had a design, and finally to a developed aesthetic, which people can now see on our website, internal documents (e.g., the Evidence of Impact document) and in our publications.
Why do aesthetics matter? At some point, we realized that aesthetics is actually a language. We care about effectiveness in communication, and thus we started to care about how things look. As we tried experiments in aesthetic communication (as with the Bottlenecks aesthetic, on display in our recent report on Bottlenecks events), we also found that aesthetics made people feel better… including ourselves. We were sold.
How does aesthetics work as a language? It’s a bit hard to say at this point. But we’ve found that where there are developed aesthetics, there are also developed concepts; when we go into new or misunderstood areas, the aesthetics are either off or absent entirely. Science tends to give blue hexagons or planets or any number of other things that don’t exactly capture the nature of discovery. Quantum biology (we’ve found) doesn’t yet have an aesthetic, mostly borrowing from the little that has been developed for quantum physics.
We encountered this problem this week while finishing our essay “What an Actual Science of the Mind Would Look Like.” We wanted images that evoked what a new science of the mind would be like and found that it was really hard to find appropriate images. We’ve been using Midjourney a lot, but the image generators have a lot of trouble getting far outside of the images they were trained on. Generating new aesthetics thus remains quite hard.
As a concrete problem, we tried generating an image that might evoke the idea of a “science of the mind” that took the form of a periodic table. (Oliver was working on this. I got to provide “helpful critique” ;).) Midjourney understood what a periodic table was but had a lot of trouble with the idea of a “science of the mind.” After lots of iterations, blending and some collage style editing, we eventually ended up with this:
Is this the final word on the aesthetic of psychology, as it develops from its current state into a full science? Definitely not. First, the “periodic table” future for psychology is only one possibility and a future science of the mind might be quite different. Second, we don’t really even feel like we’ve captured what that one future would be like. But we’ve taken a step, and hopefully we and others will take more.
If you’d like to read our recent essay on the future science of the mind, check out our essay. If you’ve seen great images on the topic, feel free to DM us on Twitter or send something through on Discord. Otherwise, we’ll be working on it more ourselves, and expect to make progress over time.
Until next week,
Geoff
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