Space I: The central argument

To arrive at that central argument we have to go back tot he roots of this project. So here goes, as briefly as possible: The world behaves… We are able to observe, reflect upon, and respond to that behaviour.

We try to model that behaviour in concepts embellished with conceptualized properties in order to explore the space of their implication through inference so that we can act deliberately and sensibly upon our environment to accommodate ourselves intelligently and intelligibly, comfortably, securely and joyfully.

Space and time are special concepts whereby we organize information relating us to our environment.

Information becomes knowledge when we know how to do things with it. This allows us to imagine possibilities…that is where design comes in.

Together with all other concepts, Space and Time help us to map and model the behaviour of the world in terms of relations between things so that we might understand that behaviour and act sensibly upon our understanding.

Concepts require other concepts to become intelligible to us. The concepts of space and time help us organize our thinking and our experience of movement and placement within our environment. That is, the concepts of space and time help organize the relations between ourselves and our environment so that we can make sense of them and explore their possible meaning in use.

Space may be seen as the container for the full set of relations that could obtain between a person and that person’s environment. We use the idea of space to map any and every relation and portray it in terms of, for example, presence, nearness, relevance, importance and so forth.

Time on the other hand registers changes in those relationships in terms of sequence, speed, duration and urgency.

Together they make it possible for us to develop, among many other things, a sense of what might be possible, and, not unimportant, of cause and effect.

All activity involves a change in relationship. Therefore it is fair to say that all activity has a spatio-temporal dimension.

Al human activity is no different. All intentional human activity is the attempt to direct changes in our relationships using deliberative reasoning. Essentially such activity tries to understand relationships and their change and then use them to good effect. That is, to act now so as to achieve some benefit in the future.

This is an important realization. Essentially it means that all human activity can be described spatio-temporally as a deliberative directing of relationships between ourselves and our environment. Let’s make this concrete with a few examples.

Cooks direct changes in relationships by cutting vegetables, slicing meats, sprinkling herbs and spices and combining them by cooking them in an environment deliberately organized to accommodate that activity intelligently and intelligibly, comfortably, securely and joyfully. They then serve up the resulting meal, arranging the food on the plate, having determined what we will smell and what it will look like and in what sequence we shall eat the various courses. All that has been spatio-temporally organized.

Civil servants direct their relationships with their environment in offices accommodating the kind of activities they do. Preparing legislation, taking care of the implementation of legislation that has been passed into law by parliament and as a result of all that changing our spatio-temporal relationships with our environment as we start behaving according to the directives of that legislation.

And so each kind of intentional human activity behaves in its own way, tries to accommodate itself well, organize its own spaces and so, in doing what they do, begin to affect the people and things around them in what they do.

Designers design the spatiotemporal setting of activities by designing systems, algorithms, products, spaces that then help accommodate and thereby direct our spatiotemporal relationships between ourselves and our environment.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.