Spectral Thinking

”Spectral Thinking (ST)” is a thinking methodology focused on capturing the diversity and variability present in the world and developing engines to operate them.

As a research project, we develop Spectral Thinking to define and build practical tools to manipulate over two key concepts: “human diversity” and “time awareness”. We operate at a range of scales — with tools like the Singularity Passage we observe and describe evolutionary and technological drivers in global societies, and with the Inclusive Prism look deeper into individual motivations.

We develop ST in the context of the unrolling Digital+AI Transformation, and cultural and social changes introduced by new technologies. Our ambition here is to explore the human and humanity perspectives and to bring them back to the innovation equations. We work with the futures considering the variability of possible trajectories and the will of multiple actors. We don’t believe that things and people are eternal, so we infuse time awareness in all our exploration.

The core aspects of ST methodology are free and open.

Origin

Spectral Thinking is based on ideas of Inclusive Design. ST extends its concepts of mismatch and persona spectrum to make them even more subjective and time-aware. Like Inclusive Design, ST explores the human aspect of our reality, the diversity of people, and the variability of their contexts. Spectral Thinking is inspired by various practical schemas of exploring and defining platforms, technical ecosystems, innovation culture, and digital transformation. ST extends them through the prism of the human factor, considering the futures variability and the idea of active trend attractors coming from Future Studies techniques.

ST emerged around 2018 from KK’s experience in studying and applying Inclusive Design and various techniques for Futures Studies and a series of training and workshops he delivered in 2018-19 for Microsoft, Miro, Acronis, Kaspersky Lab, Dodo Engineering, Sberbank, SIBUR digital, DuPont, British Higher School of Art & Design and others. The idea to develop the Spectral Thinking methodology came from the experience of building the Inclusive Transformation Framework (ITF) @ Microsoft when KK led internal working group.

Chapters (Prisms)

We explore and build the Spectral Thinking methodology and tools along with four chapters (we call them prisms):

• Inclusion Prism focused on exploring human diversity and inspired by the Inclusive Design practices;
• Singularity Prism focused on discovering the futures variability on the multi-actors landscape;
• Mycorrhiza Prism focused on designing socio-technological ecosystems and platforms (obviously inspired by natural ecosystems);
• Quantum Prism focused on shifting our understanding of future personal and collective workforces and organizational design.