The idea of maintaining peripheral vision, on "keep a look out for other challenges or new solutions all the time," resonates with me. As I understand it, maintaining peripheral vision is an act of awareness of one's environment, an understanding that a fixed point of view honed in on a goal locks us in to a particular path, a singular way of thinking and doing.
We often don't know what we need to know when we tackle difficult problems. That's the point: if we knew, the problem wouldn't be difficult. Innovation comes not from following the known but from finding and bringing in the unusual, the unknown. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, it's about juxtaposing disparate elements and seeing what happens.It's about taking in one's environment and trying to understand what you find rather than walking into an environment and imposing upon it your (pre)conceived notions.
Environments, McLuhan reminds us, are " not passive wrappings" but are instead "active processes" whose "groundrules, pervasive structures, and over-all patterns" are invisible (The Medium Is the Massage 68).
As a scholar of what might be described as "media, consciousness, and culture," my methodology is best summed up as dictum, as one of McLuhan's many aphoristic statements: "When information is brushed against information the results are startling and effective. The perennial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms" (76-78). For me, this is what it means to maintain peripheral vision, and this is why maintaining peripheral vision is important: maintaining peripheral vision allows you to be open to the new ideas, resources, and methods that come along. Without this vision, this approach, you can be a doer but you can't be an innovator.
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