What would we information architects give for an elegant or fitting worldview or world knowledge in a business domain? Faust, the protagonist of the book of the same name by Goethe, was willing to give his soul for that. And Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, could know that is the consequence. Besides lawyer, poet, humanist and literature writer he was a scientist with a new research method. A research method we can, in my opinion, use as information architects.

His method is called (goethesian) phenomenology or goetheanism. He developed it in natural-science: the study of plants and the study of colors. And he found fundamental plant patterns with it. His method consists of several phases.

The first phase: exact sensorial phantasy: intense use of the senses and observation of the system ad hand. Not being satisfied by a few cases. But going for intense and highly interested observation of the universe of discourse at hand, studying exceptions and irregularities. And not making any sense yet, but just collecting more and more actual facts into memory. Purpose is to penetrate deeply into the situation.

The second phase: agile imagination: given all these collected facts, try to make a holistic and dynamic image of the situation, using the picture or film creating capacity of the mind. The memory traces of the individual facts must melt into one.

The third phase: inner re-creation and re-petition: still withholding your judgement, replay and simulate the dynamic image or film and crawl deeper and deeper into the situation to get to the essence of it. An answer to the structure or the essence wil come.

The fourth phase: contemplative judgement: recognize through thinking the patterns, archetypes or blueprint of the situation.

It seems to be what good detectives seem to do: let the facts speak for themselves, live through the situation and come to your essential and creative conclusions. Let’s copy Morse, Frost or Dalgliesh.

This blog has been inspired by the book Aardschok, Bliksemflits (in dutch) by Wil Uitgeest.

Rijk van Vulpen is enterprise architect at Caerleon.

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