Nick Sousanis: Unflattening

The potential energy of humans is usually curtailed, leaving only flatness. 

Change your approach to discover new ways of seeing and for animating and awakening. 

The distance separating our eyes means that there is a difference between the view each produces—thus there is no single “correct” view. 

The displacement, parallax, is what allows us to perceive depth and greater meaning. 

Unflattening is a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.  

Think of argument as dance—without winners and losers. 

We come to embrace another’s viewpoint as essential to our own. 

Don’t think hierarchy of knowledge, think of a laterally branching Rhizomatic structure where each node is connected to any other. 

The medium we think in defines what we can see. 

Think in both thoughts and images. 

Reaching across the gap to experience another’s way of knowing takes a leap of the imagination. 

It’s all about your frame of reference. 

As Nelson Goodman put it, the sun moves or is still can both be true statements of the same world. 

We are like puppets dangling from strings. 

Emancipation does not mean “freed from bonds” but “well-attached”. 

The strings stay on, by identifying more threads of association we are better able to see these attachments as forces to harness.