Generative systems are technologies with the overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences.
When generative systems provide a common platform, changes may occur at varying layers (physical, network, application, content) and provide a means through which different firms and individuals may cooperate indirectly and contribute to innovation.
Depending on the rules, the patterns can be extremely varied and unpredictable. One of the better-known examples is
Conway's Game of Life
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further ...
, a
cellular automaton
A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...
. Other examples include
Boids
Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corre ...
and
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
.
More examples can be found in
generative music
Generative music is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system.
Historical background
In 1995 whilst working with SSEYO's Koan software (built by Tim Cole and Pete Col ...
,
generative art
Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that wo ...
, and, more recently, in video games such as
Spore
In biology, a spore is a unit of sexual or asexual reproduction that may be adapted for dispersal and for survival, often for extended periods of time, in unfavourable conditions. Spores form part of the life cycles of many plants, algae, f ...
.
Theory
Jonathan Zittrain
In 2006,
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain (born December 24, 1969) is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer scie ...
published ''The Generative Internet'' in Volume 119 of the
Harvard Law Review
The ''Harvard Law Review'' is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the ''Harvard Law Review''s 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 ...
.
In this paper, Zittrain describes a technology's degree of
generativity
The term generativity was coined by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in 1950 to denote "a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation." He first used the term while defining the Care stage in his theory of the stages of psychosocial d ...
as being the function of four characteristics:
* ''Capacity for leverage –'' the extent to which an object enables something to be accomplished that would not have otherwise be possible or worthwhile.
* ''Adaptability'' – how widely a technology can be used without it needing to be modified.
* ''Ease of mastery'' – how much effort and skill is required for people to take advantage of the technology's leverage.
* ''Accessibility'' – how easily people are able to start using a technology.
See also
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References
External links
A talk on generative systems by Will Wright and Brian Eno for the Long Now FoundationThe Future of the Internet and How to Stop it; Yale University Press (2008)Generative Systeme by Benedikt Groß and Julia LaubBugworld - a generative vermin installation by Philipp Sackl, Markus Jaritz & Thomas Gläser
Complex systems theory
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