Three-D projection: Global configuration of incompatible uprightness

Mind Map of Global Civilizational Collapse (Part #3)

The above challenges can be usefully configured in three dimensions. This has the potential advantage of suggesting how some of them may be effectively "invisible" from the perspective of those associated with, or recognizing, others positioned elsewhere around the surface. Such a configuration is curiously appropriate to the principled "uprightness" with which individual challenges may be associated -- by the constituencies which "uphold" their inherent value.

The polyhedron used is the icosidodecahedron which has 30 vertices. The challenges above were each associated with a vertex. The images below result from various standard geometrical manipulations of that form -- designed to trigger imaginative reframing of the relationship between the challenges. Many other such manipulations are possible to highlight other relationships.

The images are each screen shots of what can be viewed (and enlarged) much more clearly in rotation -- using a standard software package: Stella. This is developed by Robert Webb (Stella: Polyhedron Navigator). It is with this application that the images were generated and by which they were modified interactively. The clarity of the text, corresponding to the challenges presented above on the two-dimensional map, is however secondary to the projections by which they might be configured.

The approach has been extensively discussed separately:

These raise the question as to whether any "mind map" of psychosocial factors is based on a fruitful "projection", as understood in geographical mapping -- given that "projection", as understood in a psychological sense, is a defence mechanism whereby those unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or emotions (typically denied) are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Related issues were explored in an earlier approach to such mapping (The Territory Construed as the Map: in search of radical design innovations in the representation of human activities and their relationships, 1979).

Mapping onto polyhedra