Technology Space: A paradigm for specification design
October 31st, 2016
Manifest Statement: Specification design has reached a point of real world complexity that it now needs builtin self-similarity.
Builtin self-similarity implies scalability, as well as recusivity. How do we achieve this?
A technology space is a template specification, defined recursively as follows:
- A context space is a technology space.
- A semiotic space is a technology space.
- A media space is a technology space.
- Every technology space can be decomposed into its own context space, semiotic space, and media space.
The idea is you can model a specification as a technology space, decomposed into context, semiotics, and media. If any of these spaces still lack precision within this first approximation, the model can be refined. For example, say the semiotic space needs further refining, as it is also a technology space all on its own, it can be further decomposed as needed. This is done iteratively until a sufficiently refined specification is resolved.
Strictly speaking, each of the context, semiotic, and media spaces are left undefined at this level of specification. Intuitively though, the general intention of these spaces are borrowed from humanist theories of literature. Why literature? Humanists study language which expresses the complex range of human experience. As far as humans currently know (at the time of this writing), there are no experiences more complex than our ability to describe them.
Specification design exists to mitigate the same complexity of the human experience, only at a formal level. I claim no formal theory of specification design will ever supersede a natural theory of specification design. As such, I borrow from natural language literary theories to motivate the undefined terms of a technology space.
Context Space
A context space derives from the idea of context. It's the primordial soup of (usually) overwhelming information. All the objects and relationships between objects already exist within, without any real level of organization otherwise: No one object or relationship is privileged over another, everything is as of yet indistinguishable.
It is from here we filter out and narrow down contexts and subtexts of interest, which we later use to inform our discourses.
The first step in specification design is to identify this context space.
Semiotic Space
A semiotic space derives from the idea of semiotics. Signs, broken down into signifiers and signifieds, both static and fluid as the change in context. These are the cultural tags we use to build and navigate our shared social realities.
We inventory classes of word associations, connotations, so as to build filter algebras. When we have identified our context, we equip it with a semiotic space, which allows us to pull up subtexts using our filter semantics.
The second step in specification design is to identify this semiotic space.
Media Space
A media space derives from the idea of media studies. This is to say, The mediums which allow for the infrastructure in which a society communicates.
A media space is a grammar. It restricts, constricts, constrains which relationships are allowed in semiotically filtering subtexts of discourse. It defines the boundaries of the politics or the value system of communication. Without it, there would remain too much expressivity of association that the evaluation of meaning within the system would prove ambiguous.
The third and final step in specification design is to identify this media space.