IMAGINE A KIND OF SHADOWY FUTURE, hovering at the edges of the present state of things; a map of all the various ways in which the present can reinvent itself. This, dear readers, is the ever-present state known as the ‘adjacent possible.’
The term was coined by theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman, who used it to describe how evolutionary adaptations often find surprising new uses in At Home in the Universe. For instance, how feathers, evolved for warmth, turned out to be useful for flying; or how the complex jawbones of fish, no longer useful on land, proved useful for hearing. Kauffman went on to apply the term to underscore that although we may perceive a finite world, there are actually infinite possibilities hidden around us. His favourite example is the screwdriver. Most of us see a single use, but in fact, there are infinite ways it can be used. It can turn screws, wedge a door, be used in a sculpture, for spearfishing, and so on.
As applied to modern innovation by Steven Johnson, best-selling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, the adjacent possible tells us that at any moment, the world is capable of extraordinary change; but that only certain changes can happen, because good ideas are inevitably constrained by the objects and skills that surround them.
A green sheet of paper can be torn to look like grass while a black sheet of paper can be folded into a pair of cool sunglasses. And in a modern world overflowing with data, the possibilities are endless. As Kumar Srivastava recently argued in Wired magazine:
Looking adjacently from the data set that is the main target of analysis can uncover other
