Semantic Noodling

This talk was without a doubt one of the most intriguing ones. Chris brought to the stage tales of divination, randomizers and even party games to unblock creativity.

UX Podcast has an interview with Chris and Denise Jacobs on both their views on creativity.

Chris Noessel also tweets as and using the #nametale hashtag

The doors of perception by Aldous Huxley

2 out of 2 speakers referring to hallucinogenic drugs! #uxlx

— Séamus Byrne (@SeamusByrne) May 26, 2016

"What worked before is what we need not to do."
— Chris Noessel

Divination

• Haruspication : divining by sheep liver
• I Ching : produce random binary numbers to find reference to a pre written set of 'answers'
• Tarot: context, focus and outcome by drawing random cards

Entertainment

Other machines that produce new meaning:

• Mad libs
• Musikalische Würfelspiele : a musical dice game
• Ariadne's thread (latourex)
• The lonely planet guide to planetary travel. Techniques to discover a new place
• Cards against humanity

Deep structure

Signifiers, randomized in a fixed grammar & read for new meaning.

Semantic Noodling & Meaning Machines

Creativity

Poetry: "The rose is red. The violet's blue. Sugar is sweet, and so are you."

N+7 (oulipo)

Signoras, randomized in a fixedgram & read for mean square

Constrained writing allows us to find new linguistic formulations.

We've gone from Haruspication - reading future on a sheep's liver to Oulipo, a way of randomizing an intended text. @chrisnoessel #uxlx

— Gabriel Lovato (@gabrielhl) May 26, 2016

Name Reconstruction

Exercise

Name recostruction @meaningmachines #nametale pic.twitter.com/XdnEiOIX6p

— Marzia Battaglia (@marzia_bat) May 26, 2016

Sketch by @dblo_om

@meaningmachines

Name: David Blum

Story: A farmer picking up weed flowers #UXLx #sketchnotes pic.twitter.com/9DhJ2RwEC5

— David Blum (@dblumx) May 26, 2016