A keyboard resting on a rug
Perfectly describable; not usually a named kind of object or relation.
If thousands of people began doing it for a particular purpose, would that change?
CAB / 002 Things that might exist.
Things that might exist.
Words that do not yet.
An inquiry into things that do not yet exist, distinctions without names, the pathways that spread or extinguish them and the several pasts that might have produced what survives.
A distinction to start with
Possible things ≠ existing things ≠ named things.
These are different collections, not three inventories we already know how to count.THE QUESTION / 01
The world contains more distinctions than any vocabulary catalogs. Neither the physical world nor the social world is a ready-made list of objects. To predict future things, we have to study how they become possible, useful, recognizable, reproducible and sometimes nameable.
WRITINGS / IN DEVELOPMENT
01 4 investigations
01—04FUTURE WORDS / ESSAY 01
02 Is there a word for everything?
Why the things we can distinguish exceed the things we habitually name.
FUTURE OBJECTS / ESSAY 02
03 The object before its name
A future artifact has to be more than an attractive picture of something nobody has built.
POSSIBILITY / ESSAY 03
04 Which possibilities become real?
An atlas of the possible cannot be a complete list. It can be a record of constraints, openings and paths.
GENERATIVE ATLAS / ESSAY 04
An object with several pasts
Invent a future artifact. Now try to reconstruct the past that made it—without pretending there was only one.
FIELD NOTES / 001
Three ordinary provocations
NOT INVENTIONSA white plant
The description is insufficient: lack of chlorophyll, variegation, surface color and an artificial object may demand different classifications.
Would one new word reveal a useful common property, or hide important differences?
A kink in a mobile phone
A recurring fold, bend or screen crease can become a recognizable failure mode and perhaps acquire a conventional name.
Does naming follow increased prevalence, or help make the phenomenon socially visible?