In the special case of strategic interaction, understood as the relation between concealed and exposed actions, a formalized visual representation of otherwise obscure structures could provide a better understanding of actual conflict situations and their inherent risks and potentials. Based on the concept of the historical Chinese 36 Stratagems our design-driven approach tries to explore the possibilities of visualization and logographic sign languages in improving the understanding and use of stratagems in a more intuitive way.
To our understanding the general term 'strategy' is a means to plan, prevail and shape future according to a strategist’s intention. Competing strategies of interacting opponents to achieve conflicting goals always have been the driving forces in economy, society, politics and in war - in everyday social interaction. We define human interaction as strategic when it is characterized by the relation of intentions and actions towards the other side. In many cases concealed intentions and visible actions don’t directly match. As another common ground of applying strategies through strategic interaction in human power struggles is their confidentiality and intended invisibility towards the opponent and/or third parties in order to gain advantage. Rarely the visible action directly shows the intention. Revealing, disentangling and conveying opposing strategies often means to take away the other side’s advantage and sometimes gain one's own.
In order to get a better grasp of hidden human interaction structures usually made possible through their invisibility, we2 combined a design approach with insights of strategic sciences, semiotics and linguistics. Based on the traditional 36 Stratagems, an ancient Chinese arsenal of modular basic metaphorical instructions for ruses (here interpreted as: indirect interactions), we experimented with design ideas to understand 'stratagemic thinking'3 through narrative, ludic and symbolic means. Leading to a first draft of a possible logographic sign 'language', our goal is to find a visual and structural representation system to make the “Art of the Advantage”4 visible and thereby 'writable' by better de/constructing invisible agendas and intentions previously omitted in common communication layers. And to help us improving our comprehension of human behavior and interaction patterns, from a different perspective.
This is a design-driven project experimentally trying to creatively connect different scientific discourses and strategic science. As to our knowledge there is no formalized way to materialize and visualize these structures of hidden strategic intentions so we tried to invent one – resulting in a simple logographic construction system for stratagemata, like a domain specific visual (non-phonetic) ‘language’.
Strategemata were a historical collection of summarized ancient military strategy
knowledge written by Sextus lulius Frontinus, followed by a similar named collection
of the Greek Polyainos, predated by the classic works of Sun Tzu and much later
extended by famous publications such as the types of Machiavelli and von Clausewitz 5.
Over the centuries ‘strategemata’ or ‘stratagemata’ became synonymous to collections
of strategic knowledge intended for military and political purposes. Taking it out of
military context we use ‘stratagemata’ here as a general term for knowledge collections
conveying strategic rules of indirect and hidden social interactions. In the history of
known stratagemata usually one author wrote down personal and traditional, collective
experience to a continuous text of exemplary instructions and recommendations. But
there is one notable exception, where an otherwise loose collection of textual
instructions was condensed and transformed into a homogenous system of granular,
metaphorical directives: The ancient 36 Stratagems [
They originate in ancient China and became a cultural property by oral tradition.
Rooted in at least the fourth century, they have been written down in the 16th century
in the form presently known. In our culture we might know a few of these ancient
stratagems like ‘Kill with a borrowed sword’, ‘Create something from nothing’, and
‘Hide a knife behind a smile’ or are able to guess from their simple narratives like
‘Stomp the grass to scare the snake’ or ‘Point at the mulberry tree while cursing the
locust tree’, but as a full system basically taught to children they remain largely
unknown to European and Western popular culture [
5 Strategemata - Sextus Julius Frontinus, 85 AD. Strategematon - Polyainos, 109 AD. The Art of War Sun Tzu, around 500 BC, Il Principe - Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513. Vom Kriege - Carl von Clausewitz, 1832.
There’s a structural beauty in the traditional form of these 36 Stratagems clustered in six blocks ordered by possible situation types and one’s position in it (See Figure 1). „Six multiplied by six equals thirty-six. Calculations produce tactics which in turn produce calculations. Each side depends upon the other. Based on this correlative relationship, ploys against the enemy are devised. Rigid application of Military theory will only result in defeat on the battlefield.“
Prologue in 36 Business Stratagems, orig. ref. unknown [
Especially the last sentence addresses the growing awareness in Western culture
that pre-defined complex plans in theory never transform to reality as intended [
More situationally flexible and scalable strategic approaches could be necessary, so
the Stratagems offer much more adaptive, subtle, reactive and sometimes serendipitous
ways to achieve one’s goals. Central to their everyday accessibility is their perceivable
memorability. Not only with it’s 6x6 ordering but also with its consistent reduction to a
basic set of four Chinese signs to each stratagem (with the exception of the last six each
consisting of three signs) the 36 Stratagems in its original form can be seen as a
cultural knowledge preservation device characterized by structural aesthetics
(Influenced by the I Ging and by the Yin Yang polarity principle [
It represents a framework of simplification, combining metaphors and aesthetics of consistency and symmetry, in order to be easily memorable and intuitively applicable.6
The unique basic approach of the 36 Stratagems - if we try to separate it from the grim military connotation and do not judge it ethically - seems like a blueprint for an 6But, especially when coming from another culture, the metaphorical approach does not work well any more in modern times and outside its original cultural context, like basically few Westerners can relate to stratagem titles and narratives like „Besiege Wèi to rescue Zhào“ or „Obtain safe passage to conquer the State of Guo" and need a cultural translation intuitive construction kit for systemically identifying and initiating interaction patterns and their cascades in everyday human life.
Those Stratagems and what they represent only need to be transformed to be more accessible and intuitively applicable in other cultures.
As sinologist and jurist Harro von Senger, who basically brought the knowledge of
t h e 36 Stratagems from China to Europe 30 years ago, never stopped pointing out
[
In a series of design and UDK research seminars with interaction designers, communication scientists and strategists, several narratological and ludic approaches for finding better ways teaching stratagemic thinking emerged. In team projects students conceived sets of more accessible, contemporary metaphors 7, audiovisual representations8, narrative devices9 or generating whole board games centered around competitive storytelling and debating10. For brevity's sake, this will not be examined in detail here but it was an important step towards the approach presented in this paper.
In a next phase of stratagem-themed seminars we tried to find haptic, visual and logical ways to represent and construct stratagems in order to to gain a more intuitive understanding. After some research and evaluation of found references, I suggested the idea of combining the insights from previous formalization and categorization attempts (shown in Figure 2) and the underlying impression of the 36 Stratagems as a Lego-likeconstruction kit to a formalized and very simple logographic sign language starting with a basic SPO11-structure (but without phonetic usage). Inspired by an old project of my UDK colleague Timothée Ingen-Housz from 1995 called Elephant’s Memory, a non-linear “experimental logographic writing system and interactive visual language” 12
8 Fictional ‘Stratagems for Kids’-video series called ‘Trickids’ (In a design seminar, FH Aachen 2006 ) 9 A ’Black Stories’ stratagem adaption (Dennis Höfinghoff, Simon Meßmer, Maximilian Schulz, UDK 2017) 10 ‘Buereau Niveau’, a collaborative storytelling-oriented stratagem-game set in everyday office culture, or ‘Spin Doctor’, a competitive political debating game utilizing an adapted structure of the 36 Stratagems, or ‘Laubenpieper’, a competitive strategy game for climbing up the organisational hierarchy of a typical German allotment garden colony – among many other games, UDK 2010-2013 11Subject, Predicate, Object 12http://www.elephantsmemory.net a group of UDK students13 tried to create a radically simple visual construction kit of social actors, functions and attributes representing stratagems, shown in Figure 3, that could work as a card game, digital app and even as refrigerator magnets and is intended to be intuitively easy to use. Nonetheless it has the ambition to be capable of visualizing all ways of indirect strategic interactions shown in the 36 Stratagems on a meta-level, further being usable as analytical tool to write down identified or speculated, probable and possible stratagemic pattern in a formalized language-like way and therefore influencing our behavior in the long term.
Its not intended to be a full ‘spoken’ language for bidirectional communication usage but to be applied on a translating, analytical meta-level only. 13 Charlotte Zehentmair and Taina Sondermann in the seminar “Stratagem-ification” , UDK 2017
This is a design project experimenting with assumptions inspired by the scientific context. A first conceptual prototype was built from ideas derived from creatively connecting several scientific discourses we are not all experts in. This result needs to be tested further; structurally, visually and functionally improved and a proper formalizing and ontologizing process with expert help is needed to make the functional logic more commonly applicable and the system scalable in further iterations of this approach.
First feedback discussions and reactions to the result point to an interesting potential: Training to construct stratagems as a speculative interpretation in a purely visual diagrammatical way shows us learning to think in and identify stratagemic structures without knowing verbally the traditional (and culturally/metaphorically clouded and imprecise) stratagems. Just by memorizing and differentiating the logic and visual pattern and their ‘vectors’ emerging from a modular logographic construction kit this approach can help transforming the previously hardly verbally describable to the intuitively thinkable, like an antithesis to Orwell’s fictional ‘Newspeak‘. We might get a better grasp of what people think, but not tell - or if and why they show misleading actions contrasting their real intentions. Because it’s a central part of human interaction patterns, if we like it or not. Internalizing stratagemic thinking - presented here in one possible way - might be a critical sensitization process for increasing fairness and equality in complex social strategic interaction.