Communicating abstraction was a big theme last post. It’s not something we tend to reflect on in our day-to-day lives unless confronted with a related challenge. It’s an area of particular interest to me, as I find the influence of the theoretical, what cannot always be easily defined in ‘real’ terms, on the tangible to be enormously powerful. Depending on the cultural norms and context you find yourself a part of, value is applied unevenly across different principles. There

Articulating abstract ideas often results in a ‘broken-telephone’ effect whereby the intended meaning is warped at the end of its journey through the chain of transmission. If the vessels of communication operate on different frequencies, even concepts as seemingly universal as truth, beauty and meaning prove to be problematically amorphous. Consider this dilemma, of a fictional emperor, one who has just conquered territories mired by contradictions in values, unequal standar