ideagraph

I'm probably not the first one to come up with something like this, but I did develop this without researching other things which may be similar, so it may need to be tweaked as I begin to test it out. I've done one test so far, mapping out a series of ideas and things to see where they fit. With a little fiddling, I was able to come up with results that seemed like a proof-of-concept this isn't exactly the scientific method at work here I'll probably post a version of that test run at some point but for now I wanted to post  the chart in the hope that it may be helpful to at least a fraction of the half-dozens of people that occasionally wander past this blog.

Clicky-click to bigenate. Use at will, according to rules below please*

The IdeaGraph was born on a short walk I took at work the other day. I walked past a bus/camper parked in front of the Artisan's Asylum. This vehicle is some kind of mobile eye exam venture. I know this because I searched for what it was after seeing what I did. As I approached, looking up from a vantage point that was probably too close for maximum effect, I saw a bus painted mostly pale-peach, with a large, black graphic made of curving black lines, overlapping in a random way, forming a large tapered arc. What? I'm too close, so I looked again assuming it was something normally smaller than 8 feet long. Ah, an eyebrow. Yep, there's another one, down the other end. A little hard to see from where I was approaching. There is a spot that juts out when parked, fancy camper style, making the front end brow harder to see. I'm almost past it now, searching for what would have two big eyebrows, clearly a face graphic, no, a photo. There's the name, opto-blah,  whatever, but where are the eyes? Just eyebrows? No...

The eyes are the wheels! oh, I get it

Round, black, shiny hubcaps. yeah, sure, but...

Wait, the eyes are... dirty, sort of separated from the rest of the face by the wheel wells, the dark hollows are like the eye sockets in a skull, the eyes are detached, dangling, lumpy, dry, filthy, and wait... they're actually touching the street! In the gutter! Ground right in there, smooshed into the asphalt and the grit, flattening out the irises... bleeahck

Yeah, its kind of gross. Dumb. Not a good design. Not a good idea. The antithesis of eye health.

It probably started out as an interesting idea. That's how design works.But how do we know whether or not something that looks good on paper or a computer screen will work in reality. what if we tear off the eyelids, and scrub the eyes in the dirt. forever. yeah, lets try that Some things need to be mocked-up, prototyped, tested. But before we go to the trouble, we just need to think about things a little more before foisting them onto humanity.

IdeaGraph won't help you determine if your idea is worth realizing by plugging in some numbers, or cranking it through some algorithm, but it may help you to see where your idea lies in relation to other ideas. This is the reason I'm not including my own test mapping. Everyone has their own value system and the mapping skews toward what works for you. Disclaimer: In order to be useful for idea realization, you will need to think about the norms of the society upon which you be doing your foisting while mapping on IdeaGraph. So what does it do? It may just help to organize your thoughts.

How does it work? IdeaGraph helps organize ideas (and real things) by fitting them into an overall framework of their relative weights, and seeing how they compare to one another, with some Venn diagram aspects to it. The map has no real scale, and if you blow it up you can fit more into it. The more ideas you enter, the more helpful it becomes. Thinking about things that are real, as ideas rather than physical things is helpful when mapping. George Washington was definitely a real guy, but the idea of George Washington, or taxes, or music (regardless of whether you consider these things as worth it) will help you map.

An oval representing ALL IDEAS sits at the center of the graph. This oval shape represents every idea we have or can have, and its expanding over time. The ALL IDEAS oval is overlaid, Venn diagram-style, with a parabola representing GOOD, which grows upward, and is potentially infinite. The mirror of that, EVIL, is a parabola which extends downward, and is also potentially infinite. Think positive and negative on the y axis with Venn aspects.

GOOD and EVIL overlap in the center, creating a zone where things and ideas are both good and evil, again, Venn diagram-style, but with scale. The further ideas are located from the center, vertically, the more good or evil they are. Where they overlap, ideas are more meh, but the scale is still important.

There is also a scale from left to right. The further things are to the right on IdeaGraph, the more helpful they are, the further left, the less helpful (or more detrimental, depending on your viewpoint.) The line between MORE HELPFUL and LESS HELPFUL is not vertical. The higher ideas get on the vertical scale, the more the line (shown in red) slides to the left. The more evil things get, the more the line slides right. At the upper and lower limits, really good is always helpful, and really bad is never helpful. Even though the arrows are shown graphically, they are not overlays in the Venn diagram sense, its just a relative scale. Think positive and negative on the x axis.

Running vertically through GOOD and EVIL is a vague strip of weirdness. This band is a little murky and expands at the upper and lower limits, where it also becomes more vague. Unlike the line between more and less helpful, the weird band is an overlay of the GOOD and EVIL zones (Venn again) but its character changes; it doesn't have a fixed value. Its has some labels along the band to help you decide where things fall. For example, weird ideas on the low end of the GOOD scale are just ODD. The higher you go, the more lofty, and lower things get darker. Fee free to add your own intermediate labels to fine tune the scale.

Within ALL IDEAS is a smaller oval shape representing ACHIEVABLE IDEAS. These are the ideas that can be spun up into tangible things: buildings, books, movies, art, governments, nuclear bombs, etc. That means the oval ring of ALL IDEAS that sits outside ACHIEVABLE IDEAS contains the rest of our collective intangible ideas: greed, charity, despotism, faith, dragons, magic, Satan, etc.

Both the ALL and ACHIEVABLE ideas ovals extend left and right beyond the bounds of GOOD and EVIL. Some ideas and things are neither good nor evil, but we still need to decide if they are helpful or not. For example, I would argue that optimism exists outside the limits of good and evil, and as an intangible idea, it sits in the oval ring. Maybe it does; if so, does it fit on the left or the right?

The green circular area floating high at the center is labeled "Ideas worth considering." I put it here, on the good side of the scale, but overlapping the bad a little, spanning equally left and right, but a closer look at the red line shows that this zone is more helpful than not. This is where my value system indicates I should be looking. Yours may differ slightly. This zone has no hard limit; its more Vennish than Venn. This zone also extends outside what is achievable, with the hope that we can expand that oval.

Lastly is a red colored parabola, that makes up a very small portion of what is actually achievable. This is the "Ideas worth realizing" zone. This is where you want to be. It sits on the good side, but not too high, and extends to infinity on the right, toward helpful. The smallest bit of the parabola extends to the left, and the bottom just touches on bad, assuming that some ideas worth realizing may not always be extremely helpful, or without a darker side, but only at the very lowest scales. The red zone is also overlapped by the weirdness zone; some things worth doing may also be a little weird. This is where some art, comedy, and Shakespeare live. A blow-up of this zone, mapped with only real things may be helpful for graphing your ideas when they are close to fruition, to see if they fall in the red zone, or if they are just outside it (like scraping your eyeballs on the pavement) or way outside it (like Fat Man and Little Boy.)

Download it, print it out, fool around with it, and let me know if it works for you. And tell me where IdeaGraph and this blog post fit on IdeaGraph. I'm guessing a shorter post would probably move up and to the right, but I'm not sure if it makes it to the red zone! Based on my experience, mapping ideas can get pretty funny, pretty quickly.


* You are free to use the IdeaGraph for whatever you would like as long as you maintain the copyright information, the title, and the text referring to this blog. Also give credit to me, and link back here. If you decide to derive from the ideas and/or intellectual property manifest within IdeaGraph for profit, whether or not you've modified the graphics and text, then be a grownup and send me a fat check.**

** If you're unsure if this is the right course of action, plot it on the IdeaGraph without lying to yourself.*** And then send me the check.

*** If you are an evil person, IdeaGraph won't work for you, because everything you plot will be skewed down and left. Lying to yourself is as indivisible from evil as responsibility is indivisible from privilege.