Navigability & Waymaking Early Draft
Early thoughts on the frameworks.
Navigability
Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, I wanted to briefly discuss the difference between waymaking and navigability. Waymaking is the sort of umbrella or big term I'm using to express what mind is when we haven't measured or assessed it. A navigability is an external representation of a way making trajectory in a particular landscape. I mean this literally like an external representation, some kind of a visualization model. We can externally represent particular trajectories that are possible for us within particular landscapes. And those are the navigabilities.
And in so doing we began to notice that we all have different navigabilities. And we also can compare our own with uh, different other beings like the wonderful creatures that we live with and depend upon also have their own navigabilities. And all of these nest together to be, for example, the way ability of a city, or the way ability of a [00:01:00] nation, we can look at that overall process.
We can never model it. But but we can model parts of it as navigabilities. The way making is all the movement, all the making way of all of us, ongoing, dynamic, shared. All that we take in, the air, the light, one another's voices, one another.
All mixed and entangled. However, there are different regularities, there are Markov blankets, there are bodies, there are distinctions in this beautiful space from our perspective. And so we can begin to externally model the paths and trajectories of affordances that those particular embodied positions have in particular landscapes. That's the navigability. It's always an external representation. It's looking at what paths. are open in what sort of landscapes, be those social, emotional, economic, geographical, how do we make our way through the city, we can model it through the navigability.
The wayability of a city is the overall the overall sense of how accessible that city is in all these [00:02:00] other different spaces which combine as one. But when we look at the navigability, we need to determine exactly what we're looking at. For example, are we looking at nearness in the economic landscape?
How affordable is everything around me to me, depending on where I live? Or are we looking at something geographical, like how close am I to green space, to a park? Those are different kinds of navigabilities, but we can model them all together and look at them together. And when we do that, we get a better sense of the overall livability or wayability of something like a city, or maybe something like a relationship, or maybe something like one of our own processes or habits.
Mind Intelligence, cognition, whatever word you want to use, is making way from an embodied position.
And it can never be measured, it's always ongoing, shared, dynamic. It's the process. It's the way life makes. It comes in many different forms. We usually talk about it in the human form, but you can look at it at all scales and nested levels. The thing it has in common is this way [00:03:00] making happening from wherever you want to look, it's all one ongoing process.
Navigability is the word I use for when we try to measure that process.
And what we're doing is, For example, looking at, if we're going to look at geographical space, we would be looking at the statistical regularities as represented, in some form. If it's a city, if it's a park or whatever, we would be looking at this area and how a body can make its way through that and what the affordances are. This would be the navigability, we can also look at this in different spaces, such as conceptual spaces, emotional spaces, linguistic spaces, economic spaces. I call those landscapes because we've, We've taken them away from the whole and we're looking at a particular orientation of statistical regularity.
For example, maybe you live in a certain area of town and there's a lot of nice shops close to you. Those might be accessible in terms of walking there within a certain amount of time, but how accessible are they relative to your economic [00:04:00] situation? How accessible are they relative to your social situation?
Do you look in a way that is not welcome there, for example? Do you dress in a way that is not welcome there, or vice versa? What about the money that you make, the health care that you get? Are those things accessible? This is a matter of navigability, and this is
what, what we're I'm working on in many different areas, that's the difference.
The way making is the bigger umbrella term that can be understood by everyone as when we, are looking at life and we want to talk about it in terms of something like mind or intelligence or cognition, what we're really looking at is how that body makes its way through space and time.
When we really want to look at them and measure them and assess them, then we can't do that in full and we have to realize that we can't do that in full. And that's why we need a change of terms. And so then we're looking at the navigability. We're looking at what is the ability of that embodied position to navigate a certain space?
What is the [00:05:00] developmental trajectory of historical inherited affordances that this body has that it must somehow make way with, that is the navigability and those are external representations. They're only little parts of this ongoing process, but in representing them externally and talking about them as navigabilities, looking at what's possible.
What affordances are possible? How can we move in this emotional space, this linguistic space, this economic space, this geographical space, when we look at it like that, we began to notice, okay, this is, um, very much different depending on what position you are in. For example, if you're in this certain economic position this area is much less navigable than it is for someone in another position. The same is true relative to a lot of the social constraints that we are born into. But until we have a way to really model them, look at them, externally represent them as navigability, we don't really become aware of them. We all assume we're all navigating in the same way and we have the same [00:06:00] affordances and abilities in these different spaces.
But of course we don't because we all come from very different histories and we're all seen by the world around us. Through no fault of our own, very differently according to those trajectories. And the only way we're going to gain agency and build bridges between these different points of view, and open the space, hold the space, be able to sit with the fact that there are many different right ways of being in the world, rather than this either or dichotomy of having to choose one path or the other, or one trait being better than another, which is just ridiculous at this point in our time, then we need a way to look at it as navigability as different ways of getting to similar places and also as paths that we're each making in our own way.
And not only us, but all beings, creatures, insects, Trees, plants, everything has its own navigability relative to the space in which it must encounter in order to survive and thrive. Once we can look at this as navigability, externally represent, we can start to see [00:07:00] where there are overlaps, where there are discrepancies, where certain conditions or inherited situations are causing a difficulty in navigability or helping with navigability, and we can start to open up and notice this about one another, and in so doing change those paths and help one another build better paths, and increase navigability in different spaces.
And in so doing, We're building better spaces because it all goes together. It's one wonderful moving process. That's the way making, and you can't model that and you can't stop it and you can never see it fully, but together we can represent it. We already do this when we create music, when we create art, when we have a conversation.
All these are ways that we, through some external representation or symbolic medium, what I call System Three spaces. We're modeling for one another, we're representing for one another, um, parts of this ongoing lived experience that we have. And that's a very important thing for each of us to do, [00:08:00] and to be heard doing, to be seen doing, to be sensed, to be allowed to do, to be given freedom to do, and these we can look at externally as navigabilities.
There's more to learn from that and more for me to learn from that. I welcome all your comments and join the Substack Way & Lifeworld, where we will be discussing these things. I really do appreciate your feedback there.
So thank you for being here and I hope you're having a beautiful day, wherever you are out there.