# Activity Space ![](E6EFAF86-53BA-4CC7-8A22-671DC2597375.png) Activity space is the set of all activities that people can do that contribute to new knowledge and abilities.[^1] “Ideas” jump from activity to activity, getting added to or changed in the process. These memetic footballs merge and split, sometimes carried by one person between activities and sometimes being handed off to someone else. Obviously what entails an “idea” is obscenely [[Nebulous]] and there is no right way to draw lines between them, but I think the concept of activity space is useful, nevertheless. Ideas will inevitably become ill-shaped for a particular class of activity, for example when an idea that was previously well-served by curiosity-driven probing needs goal-driven systems-level work to get to the next level. There are many frameworks to describe these transitions: [[Technology readiness level - TRL]], the Basic/Applied research distinction, etc ([[Research has many orthogonal and non orthogonal classification axes]]). Of course, knowing what activities an idea “wants” at any given time is incredibly hard and there is probably Take an extremely ham-fisted account of modern semiconductors: the work to purify germanium and create diodes for radar (clear goal, product driven, iterative, experimental, timeline, large teams and parallel efforts) led to work to create germanium triodes (small team (3), speculative, experimental, goal but not use-case driven) which demonstrated some odd phenomenon that needed to be explained theoretically (blackboard, theoretical, white space). This theory enabled the group to hypothesize that the germanium could be used to build an amplifier (imaginative, playful, speculative). However physically realizing this idea was very hard, potentially impossible. The work to physically realize the triode involved a lot of just trying shit out (fat process, playful, but goal oriented). The team originally tried to build a FET but it proved too hard, but analyzing the failure (slack to try many shots on goal, failure analysis) The list of all these knowledge-generating activities is probably too long to enumerate (it may just be a list of all types of human activity) but here’s an attempt [[A list of Knowledge generating activities]]. Not all people, organizations, and institutions are equally good at enabling different activities. Different personal attributes, organizational structures, and institutional incentives lend themselves to certain activities and suppress others. [[Overlapping institutional constraints rule out several classes of creative work]]. As a result, it’s rare for an idea to achieve its full potential within a single person/org/institution and no person/org/institution should be applied to all ideas. ### Related * [[Research organizations have core activities that act as discrete units]] [^1]: You could see these as all the different things that people do to cultivate the [[Knowledge frontier]]. If [[The tech tree is a scaffolding inside the knowledge frontier]], you could frame activities as the inputs to creating new heuretics. (See [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]]). [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Activity+Space) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Activity+Space)