Nuggetization #

AKA hyper-contextualized/meaning-filled encapsulated nodes #

Nuggetization is what I call when we wrap up and set aside information for use in a particular context. Watching myself and the people around me, I think it's something we do all the time.

It's a little bit chunking, which means it's a bit of memory management. It's a little bit compartmentalization, so a bit of emotions management. It leverages dimensional information, so it's a bit of information architecture.

Nuggets can be filled with emotions, history, goals, desires, smells, physical context. It’s basically anything and everything that we experience, compacted and set to open for use when memory is triggered.

“Triggered” is a high-potency word in our culture these days. It brings up visions of distress and anger. What people are opening during their triggered moments is a nugget – a learning that they’ve encapsulated, in this instance to more easily set aside while they meet the criteria of socially accepted behavior. These are nuggets with high emotional intensity, but they are not the only nuggets we form.

Is there something you only do sporadically? Paying taxes. Visiting a church of a faith you don’t normally visit, but have before. A hobby you put aside. Running into someone you haven’t seen for years.

When you pick up that doing again, or get near it, memories spark. All your understanding comes back, maybe in dribbles, maybe in a flood, maybe somewhere in the middle, maybe in dribbles then escalating to a flood. But the data is pulled top of mind again, along with all the contextualization. The nugget has been triggered open by a memory spark.

So, it’s a deep-encapsulated node, probably with supporting metadata, filled with physical/placement and emotional contextualization. Technically, emotions are physical — they flow through a body by means of chemical and mechanical transports. In terms of our current culture, it’s useful to keep them highlighted.

Nuggetization is the process of making a nugget. A nugget is what we use. It acts like a node in our brains, but as far as I’ve been able to discern  (watching people/myself, reading in cognitive psychology and anthropology, asking questions, meditation are my key inputs) it’s a data node of heightened richness. It can encapsulate any complexity of multilayered, multivariable information structures — from hierarchy to system — with the only cap being what can be kept in mind.

To be fair, there are a handful of information architects that I formed connections with purely because I was searching for vocabulary around this concept. This is a me word — like strata — that I have not been able to confirm or deny in the zeitgeist. Many people get it intuitively, some people chortled and decried, "I'm going to start calling it that!", and some people have looked at me like I've lost my damned mind. Take it with a grain of salt. It seems to work. It's a likely shift point for taxonomy.