The Utility of Ambiguity

Old-school browser tabs. Finding functional solutions to information or knowledge management and seeking optimised user interfaces is nothing new. This particular device and engineering solution (pictured above) was designed to allow researchers to “rapidly” switch between pre-selected texts.

Most of the innovations and creative engineering solutions we currently deploy are really only refinements and recombinatory conceptual iterations of existing heuristics and their related problem spaces. The word “Innovation” and its bundled suite of associations and assumptions finds itself in our shared information culture as a word so ubiquitous, so widely over-used and yet also and simultaneously so diversely or poorly-defined and misunderstood.

It appears that a degree of ambiguity may be an inverse function of the generalised utility of any concept.