6. Clean Space
& Emergence Room

Here we are, in the Clean Space and Emergence room, where you can wander around to get different perspectives on the canvas on which our thoughts are painted — perceptual space.

This room is dedicated to the ideas that David Grove and others have developed since the publication of our book Metaphors in Mind in 2000. Soon after the turn of the millenium David Grove began exploring the effects on a client’s internal perceptual space as they physically moved around their external space.  He developed a process to facilitate this called Clean Space.  As well as creating some new clean questions, for the first time Clean Space involved using a set of clean directives.

Based on David’s interest in ‘small world’ network theory and the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, Clean Space quickly evolved into Clean Worlds and from there into Emergent Knowledge. The latter facilitates the emergence of new information by iterating through a series of precise routines and six repetitions of particular questions.

Also in this room are articles on the closely related notions of proximity — the significance of adjacency in perception — and a more advanced piece on psychoactive space which surveys a variety of change processes involving inner and outer spatial perceptions.

Learning to use Symbolic Modelling requires you to become a master of space (and time) — whether a client is sitting in one place and you are asking Clean Language questions of their Metaphor Landscape, or they are moving around in a Clean Space/Emergent Knowledge process.

Next, the tour will take us deeper inside the gallery, into the Modelling Room. But first we'll take a brief detour via the News Room.