Adjacent possible
Concept introduced by Stuart Kauffman. In his own words, see video
From p2p Wiki
"The concept of the adjacent possible originates from Stuart Kauffman and his work on biological evolution. Kauffman was particularly interested in the origins of order and the mechanisms that drive self-organization. His findings are broadly applicable to any complex adaptive system, be it natural like the biosphere, or human-made like cities, the economy, or technology. Kaufman investigates how the actual expands into the adjacent possible. The actual describes the system under investigation in its current state, with all its components and interconnections. The adjacent possible contains all the elements outside but near that system; those represent the opportunities for the current system to expand by building new connections and turning those elements into system components.
Now let’s apply this abstract notion to technology and innovation. And let’s take today’s ‘technosphere’ as the actual, comprising all the tools and technologies we use in modern-day societies, together with the knowledge, concepts, facts and ideas required to devise, build, operate, and maintain them. Right outside that ‘technosphere’, in its adjacent possible, you’ll find the space for innovation, for combining known technologies in novel ways, and for developing and implementing novel problem-solutions that yield novel technologies.
The concept was introduced to Sensoricans by Helene Finidori, somewhere around 2015.
The adjacent possible therefore provides a powerful framework to structure a further investigation of innovation. see paper.
Relations to OVN, Sensorica's practice
Sensorica builds on open source development and inherite a good documentation culture. People build relationships between tech srtifacts and leave them behind as hyperlinks, text, videos, ... The Internet is a giant web of information that relates all pieces of tech together and even extends to speculation, or projects announced but not yet started. The open source license allows for forking and remix. It is the remix operation that leads to the concept of the adjacent possible.
Sensorica's NRP formalizes these relations between projets, resources. It becomes possible to algorithmically describe adjacent possibles. This builds on the anecdote that Tibi likes to tell, when Bruce walked into the Sensorica lab (dewhere in 2014) and asked if there was an optical moisture sensor. Tibi pulled 2 optical fiber prototypes from the drawers that had nothing to do with measuring moisture, belonging to very different projects, and remix them into an optical fiber-based soil moisture sensor 2 days later. That's an example of remix, which goes further than simply combinatorial, because this new sensor contains a little more than the two sensors that were used to create it, put together. It is a good example of adjacent possible.