Why

Problem, early-adopting customer, and process.

The factionAR project proposes that VR, traditional AR, and other technologies to help process the many potential outputs, be used to develop open-source and branded code that allows a working environment to be delivered which maximises the creativity and business-sense of individuals, teams, and departments.

Problem

Good business practice suggests we should identify a problem which customers actually need solving, before we alight on a technology: otherwise, cart before venerable horse.

This, then, is our problem:

  • In a world of multiplying specialisms - within organisations, sometimes within a department, often between interest groups, especially up and down a hierarchy - people rarely speak the same language.

  • In order for a decision to be taken on the basis of someone else's high-level domain expertise - their efficient "thinking without thinking" - we have to trust what an expert says without understanding their words.

  • What's more, sometimes we get the feeling that they don't entirely understand us.

  • Either way, in order to trust their intuition, we ask them for traditional data so they can back up their specialist assertions to our satisfaction.

  • Even this traditional data is often so specialised, that we still have very little comfort when we a) take our strategic or operational decisions based on what the expert believes; or b) make some long-term policy or other.

  • In many contexts - crime, auditing, education, medicine - mission-critical decisions are taken by decision-makers (judges, accountants, headteachers, consultants, to only touch on the very top of these corresponding hierarchies), when helicopter views prevail.

  • In the end, we take decisions on "what feels right": and often, what feels right is what allows us to sense if everything goes wrong, at least we are covered by expertise we still don't understand.

Early-adopting customer

This is our proposed early-adopting customer:

  • Everyone and anyone who uses high-level domain expertise - either:

    • someone else's in order to take mission-critical decisions; or

    • their own in order to do the same; or

    • when it's clear that we shoulder the blame were something to go very wrong, it's ourselves and our own intuitive perception and judgement which will inform someone else's transcendental conclusions.

A process - NOT a technology - which once delivered

To resolve our problem for our early-adopting customer, we feel we have identified a process - NOT a technology - which once worked fabulously to deliver on similar goals.

Our analogy therefore - and its corresponding implications - might run as follows:

  • Blogging is different from traditional writing, not primarily in the tools used (over time, convergence has taken place) but, rather, more importantly in the sense that its process involves bouncing off the ideas of other writers on a daily basis before being able to deliver the content.

  • Blogging at its best, and the so-called blogosphere in which it takes place, involves an unending brainstorming activity, where connections are almost frenetically made through hyperlinking, effervescently multiple readings, parallelisms and other dynamics from the worldwide web way of doing things.

"The goal of factionAR is, then, to recreate the creative conditions once delivered by such a blogosphere through the use of a software code which creates spaces of multi-sensorial, multi-intellectual, multi-layer and multi-path experiences: unpredictabilities where the objects so contained demonstrate, more and more, a very real agency - a very real ability to engage and act alone, and in essentially surprising ways."

Mil Williams

Founder, Better Biz Me Ltd

In this way, not just through the written word (as was mainly the blogosphere at its height) but also through artificial realities of a multiple-media nature it will become possible for everyone in an organisation to re-acquire creative skillsets probably mostly lost to youth for the vast majority, as well as acquire and apply focussed instincts more relevant to modern business and other organisations.