IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

and Amsterdam. Places whose lifeblood flows through a rich web of connections
are a better bet than places that think of themselves as centers.
This applies to countries and regions, too. The first major industry, textiles,
owed a great deal to the transfer of knowledge from India. A great deal of
potential innovation comes from the study of plants. Of the roughly
265,000 plant species that we know exist, probably 40,000 have medicinal
or nutritional applications for humans—yet only 1,100 have been thoroughly
studied. In catching up, we would be wise to learn from other
cultures, which are often better informed about their potential than we
are. Ethnoecology, the study of indigenous ways of using local resources,
can help us here. Forest-dwelling peoples classify and use 99 percent of the
rich biological diversity. 16
Susantha Goonatilake describes as ‘‘civilizational knowledge’’ such cultural
constructs as metaphors, which he describes as ‘‘the pregnant mother
to scientific innovation.’’ Theories in science often originate in metaphors,
says Goonatilake; ‘‘a vast soup of metaphors and theoretical constructs
exists in the Asian world. These vary from sophisticated debates on the nature
of ontology and epistemology to discussions in psychology, the nature
of mind, mathematics, and medicine. Such an infusion would help enlarge
our scientific horizons.’’ 17 The potential is huge. During the last hundred
years, probably two thousand catalogues of known South Asian manuscripts
have been compiled. Each catalogue encompasses about two
hundred manuscripts, so the resource adds up to four hundred thousand
manuscripts. Others have estimated that South Asian manuscripts amount
to some five hundred million. ‘‘The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution,
the Enlightenment and the great discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries
were the result of recombining, not just discovering, ideas,’’ says Goonatilake.
‘‘The rediscovery of Asian thought is a second renaissance in the cultural
history of the West, with the potential to be equally important as the
rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance.’’ 18 We need to
become hunter-gatherers of ideas and tools: How have other societies lived
in the past? How do societies live in other parts of the world today? Has
this question been answered somewhere else already?
From Blank Sheets of Paper to Smart Recombination
Flow 217
Designers are needlessly constrained by the myth that everything
they do has to be a unique and creative act. Rather than expect to design