Doodlebugging: A Bayesian Methodology of Design

Abstract

Divination can be seen as a systematic method of organizing what appears to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand.¹ Divination practices are epistemic technologies² aiming to obtain factually accurate information about the world in order to inform decisions and actions by supernatural or magical means that have been extremely common, possibly even universal.³ Despite this prevalence, the specific methods of divination exhibit substantial variability: deciphering gods' messages from the flight patterns of birds (augury), inquiring about one's fate through the position of the stars and planets at the time of one's birth (astrology), or identifying the cause of a disease by feeding poison to a chicken (chicken oracle). This thesis will question whether modeling enterprises can further contribute to understanding divination as a technology by incorporating it into a design methodology, and what I will refer to as divination in this project includes inferring meaning from a dowsing wand, traditionally used to find or locate water, in order to inquire about the design that is in equilibrium with the flow and direction of energies in the universe. Furthemore, I will assemble and construct a probabilistic model based on the dowsing experiments to investigate the complexity of the HVAC systems.