Toby Boudreaux, partner and chief technology officer at Control Group and his colleague Jaz gave an amazing talk about generating identities in the urban and public space. The talk was based on hardcore tech stuff but focused on the user and human identities which gave the whole thing a pretty fascinating perspective.
Here a few notes derived from their slides about “Generative Identity”:
ID is a function
- Not a matter of A=A; not absolute
- True of people and locations
- Identity is about boundaries drawn in complex space
People
- act with license in mind, and license is derived (largely) from desired identity
- act semi-predictably when important dimensions are known
- can be engineered toward actions by hacking incentives, accountability, and visibility
Locations
- modern locations are more than points, lines, planes and volumes
- other layers exist – technological, derived, recorded/historical
Obviously
- N-dimensional systems resist reduction
- Everybody is a snowflake (<- reduction)
- Person != persona. Got it.
Observations
- People like a little concrete in their ontological soup
- Stereotyping is considered a poor strategy, generally
- Instead, define the identifying characteristics and let the people/locations grab onto them
- Archetypes as attractors, not as impositions
- Tune (for) the archetypes