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With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that comprise Saturn’s faint rings.

At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts—larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level—dry land—and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your own kind which the computer generates, until you form a tribe. You can play a violent game of conquest over other tribes or you can play a social game of conciliation. If you make clever choices, according to the logic of the simulation, you will survive and continue to evolve. Along the way, you get to acquire ever more powerful tools and weapons, and to create dwellings, towns, cities. When your city has conquered the other cities in your world, you can build a spaceship and launch into space. By the final level, you have evolved into an intergalactic god who can travel throughout the universe conducting interplanetary diplomacy and warfare.

From Will Wright’s point of view, we can gain a complex way of understanding the world, using very simple rules. Ever since we have had the ability to customize our desktops, we’ve been creating expressions of our identities, creating a “curve” of creation that started at crap and ended at something better. The trend in game development started the same way.

Wright uses the term “player” to describe those of us who create. According to his experience, players love making and sharing their content, but instead of the players building static models that participate in a game, today the paradigm is one of the games creating the players. Games become a measurable, formalized environment that offers loads of data that suggest players spend much more time building complexity into their models. In that sense, computers become a creative amplifier for the player.

In a demonstration of his new game Spore, Wright created a creature with a few mouse clicks, and the computer fills in the basics of evolution. The game takes it from there. In the space of a few minutes, Wright not only hunted and mated, but he created a vehicle that was able to explore other lands, planets and galaxies.

Science shows that we are born with powerful tools for overcoming our perilous complacency. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the inclination. The truth is we can change with breathtaking speed, sculpting even "immutable" human nature. Forty years ago many people believed human nature required blacks and whites to live in segregation; 30 years ago human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff. Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.

The 18th-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, from the Latin sapiens, meaning "prudent, wise." History shows we are not born with wisdom. We evolve into it.

As the elevation increased, the individual structures of barns and airplane hangers receded to reveal vast networks: canal systems, topographic complexity, patchworks of natural and artificial boundaries etched into the skin of the earth.

This, my friends, is the 20,000-foot view sited so often in boardrooms and consulting documents; it is the elevation that explodes the perception of “seperateness” and “silos” as mere texture in the rich tapestry of the earth.

Now, imagine being that early pilot coming back to earth. Imagine their frustration when explaining to the farmers and truck drivers and milkmaids the wonder of seeing all that connected complexity. (How easy and elegant it looked!) Then, those pilots had to walk home. Uphill. In the snow.

[photo: Peter Durand]

This is the experience that may be shared by many of us in our own work.

As individuals and small groups––with help from research, collaboration, imagination––we’ve caught a glimpse of that futurescape, the possible horizons, the beauty and complexity that knits all the manic activities together.

So, what is essential in sharing the vision with others, those farmers, trucker drivers, milk maids, executives, board members?

It is a map to go along with the story.

This requires a tiny bit of work and ingenuity. Mostly, it requires moving away from the linear and becoming comfortable with the non-linear, away from the bullet-point list and towards systems thinking.

As a graphically minded visual learner myself, I have to admit full-disclosure: I can’t work any other way now!

I mean, after those early flights, when the topography of the countryside was revealed to the pilots’ eyes, well, after that, there’s no going back.

Now, when faced with your next Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), remember to zoom out. Draw big. Map out relationships and connections. Examine the whole topography of the situation.

Take that flight. And, this time, bring along some passengers.

You Are Here
by Katharine Harmon — Amazon

Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall — Amazon

The Mind Map Book
by Tony Buzan and Barry Buzan — Amazon

Peter Durand is a graphic facilitator who runs his business Alphachimp Studio, Inc. from Pittsburgh. You can learn more about Peter and his work, and find more of his writing on his Website.

[Photo: Team members map out issues. Credit: Peter Durand]

IVFP 2006: Photogallery