Foundations for Knowledge Architecture

For centuries, architects have designed physical spaces to support the effective interactions of people. Sometimes these designs are purely functional, but, to be successful, an architect must combine aesthetic elements that make buildings feel comfortable, beautiful or harmonious to the people who live and work within them. This recognition of the value of aesthetics is one of the differences between architecture and industrial design/engineering.

Knowledge architects design spaces for learning that come to life with the interactions of the people within them. These spaces may be generated between people separated by distance and connected by telecommunications, or they may be conceptual spaces generated through using a multimedia program that enables a person to consider ideas from different perspectives or explore changing game environments.

Knowledge architecture reflects the human need to understand the beauty and elegance of the space of conceptualization and the joy and timelessness of the act of learning itself.

We believe that children ought to have access to advanced technologies, as long as these are designed as instruments of love, play and insightful learning. Unfortunately we see very little of this. As knowledge architects we wish to design interactive interfaces through which children and the technology will be in a mutual supportive relation. To this end, we have not wanted to make computer games so compelling that children become glued to machines. Rather we want to use the technology to have children wonder, be curious, ask questions and talk to each other. We want to use technology to help children see their world in a new way. We want to make learning interfaces for children so that they can use the amazing resources of the Worldwide Web to learn about our world and about each other’s culture.

The praxis of Knowledge Architecture is grounded in two domains of Heinz von Foerster's Second Order Cybernetics:

• Gordon Pask 's Conversation Theory (a science of learning) and
• Humberto Maturana's Biology of Cognition (a biology of human mental functions).

Second order cybernetics is the name given to the science exploring the self-referential nature of perception and conception in observing systems, as distinguished from first order cybernetics, the science of control and communication in animals and machines. It has been deeply influenced by the Maturana's interpretation of cybernetics as the art and science of human understanding.

Basic References

Pask, G. The Limits of Togetherness. Invited Paper to IFIP, World Congress in Tokyo and Melbourne in Lavington, S H(ed.) Information Processing 80, North Holland, 1980;

Maturana H. R. and Varela F. J. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 42 Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel,1980;

Maturana, H.R. Ontology of Observing. The biological foundations of self-consciousness and the physical domain of existence. In Beobachter: Konvergenz der Erkenntnistheorien. Ed. Nilas Luhman, Wilhem Fink Verlag, 1990;

Maturana, H.R. Biology of the Aesthetic Experience. In Züchen und Praxis, Wissenschafsverlag Rothe, Passau, 1993;

Maturana, H.R. and G. Verden-Zöller, The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Intimacy, 1995.