Yunkaporta’s 5 minds, derived as bridge to Indigenous thinking from the principles of the Aboriginal knowledge system (2019)
You can’t help but look at these 5 minds that Tyson Yunkaporta has derived from the principles of the Aboriginal knowledge system as a means for us to embrace Indigenous thinking and think how well they reflect the ideal stance of a designer working in complex adaptive systems, particularly when the operating environment is so very different from their own home base, such as the informal rural and urban economic systems in Africa. He introduces them in more detail, tracing their roots and relationships in his book Sand Talk, reviewed by me here and from a different perspective, here.
From the designer’s vantage point, pattern-mind has been the most important and the first and foremost requirement as it facilitates one’s capacity to see the whole, and approach design-centric solution development from a holistic perspective. Inevitably, then, kinship-mind must come next from the creative practitioner’s point of view, and, it seems to me, that if I were to draw relationships between these minds, then kinship-mind and pattern-mind would have to stand together in parallel, since it is this orientation that relationships and connectedness (key to an Indigenous-inspired stance) that allows us to grasp the complexity of life on earth and complex socio-technical-ecological systems as a whole.
Story-mind, as any multidisciplinary team in design or product development would recognize, is the back and forth of ideas and concepts being worked out in collaboration and conversation until they coalesce into a coherent direction. Thus, it would seem, story-mind stands in parallel to dreaming-mind as a reflection of the creative activity within a team or group, particularly when feeding ideas off of not only each other but also drawing inspiration from user research on the walls and working with post-its. This, imo, needs more working out – probably through observation of teams engaged in the design process.
And finally, ancestor-mind, who stands alone, for deep engagement and connection with our own ‘alpha wave state’ is the being in the “zone” of creation that each must do alone as they work their way through all the inputs and ideas and information. From the perspective of the design process, this could happen at the beginning, after fieldwork but before a workshop, or it could happen after a workshop or team session, when the form begins to manifest in the form of sketches or other embodied and experiential modes of thinking (for example, model making, early prototypes from scrap, etc). Ancestor-mind might be the foundation or the frame of reference within which the other minds situate themselves, since it is channeling ancestor-mind that allows for patterns and relationships to find their way to each other in the form of understanding. It brings all the work done by the other minds together. It is the magic of design.
This is the just the beginning of my thinking about thinking, and I may find out that I am wrong in my first attempts to correlate Yunkaporta’s work with my own. But its links to my own early work are undeniable.
