Last Updated: 1st October 2026
Purpose
The Ideonomy Project aims to recover, understand, practise and develop the work of Patrick Gunkel on Ideonomy — the science of ideas.
Gunkel left a substantial body of material containing terminology, classifications, methods, organons, templates, examples and speculative applications. Much of this material is exploratory, overlapping and unfinished. The immediate task is therefore not simply to read or summarise it, but to determine the methodology underlying it and discover whether that methodology can be usefully applied.
The project has a long-term additional objective: to investigate whether ideonomic methods can be formalised computationally and ultimately incorporated into an AI-supported Ideonomic engine.
The project will proceed experimentally. Its roadmap is consequently a working document rather than a fixed programme and will be reviewed as our understanding develops.
The Central Research Route
The project follows five broad, interconnected activities:
- Survey
- Map
- Reconstruct
- Practice
- Mechanise
These provide direction rather than rigid sequential stages. Work at some later point will likely reveal something requiring us to return to an earlier one.
1. Survey — Establish the Territory
The first task is to establish what Gunkel actually created.
This includes surveying the five surviving notebooks available to the project, identifying their broad contents, relationships, apparent purposes and condition, and establishing what other relevant material exists.
The aim is to understand the territory before attempting to reconstruct the system within it.
Gunkel’s notebooks are available through the MIT website. They are referred to by colour rather than explicitly numbered: Blue, Bright Green, Green, Orange and Yellow.
The Orange Notebook has been provisionally selected as the first notebook for detailed examination. Initial investigation suggests that Orange contains material particularly useful for understanding how ideonomy might actually be practised.
This is a working hypothesis, not an assumption that Orange is inherently the most important notebook. It may be revised as our knowledge of the complete collection improves.
2. Map — Recover Gunkel’s Machinery
Once the broad territory is understood, individual material can be mapped in detail.
For Orange this means identifying and recording its terminology, subdivisions, organons, templates, ideogenetic formulae, recurring structures, procedures and other methodological components.
Three initial resources will hopefully emerge from this work:
- The Orange Map — a structured map of Orange’s nineteen constituent pieces, their contents, purposes, methods and relationships.
- The Glossary — a developing record of Gunkel’s specialised terminology and its usage. (The Yellow Notebook contains a glossary which will be utilised once cleaned up)
- The Organon Register — a record of the conceptual tools and procedures encountered throughout the material.
Initial examination has already suggested a hidden progression within Orange:
- What is ideonomy?
- What are its tools?
- Here are general-purpose tools
- Watch them being used
- Here are the ideas they produce.
We have also identified Gunkel’s proposed structure for an ideal ideonomic chapter. Its progression through examples, types, relationships, dimensions, causes, effects, structures, ignorance, ideogenetic formulae, applications and exercises begins to resemble an algorithm for systematic thought.
These early findings now require careful examination against the source material.
3. Reconstruct — Understand the System
Gunkel’s work contains many ideas developed at different times and for different purposes. The project will therefore attempt to reconstruct the methodological system underlying the surviving material.
Questions include:
- What are the fundamental ideonomic operations?
- Which apparently separate organons are examples or variations of more general operations?
- How do organons relate to one another?
- Can organons be combined, transformed or recursively applied?
- Which ideas remained stable and which developed over time?
- Where are there gaps, inconsistencies or unresolved possibilities?
The project will endeavour to maintain a clear distinction between three layers:
- Gunkel’s original work
- our interpretation and reconstruction
- subsequent extensions of ideonomy
This distinction is essential because although a useful reconstruction may make Gunkel’s work more systematic than the surviving material itself, our reconstruction must not subsequently be attributed to Gunkel as though he had written it that way.
4. Practise — Do Ideonomy
We feel that Ideonomy cannot be adequately evaluated merely by describing it.
Recovered methods will therefore be applied to controlled subjects and the process recorded. Experiments should preserve their inputs, methods, intermediate reasoning, outputs, failures, surprises and useful results.
Where possible, ideonomic investigation can be compared with ordinary free-form investigation.
The central empirical question is:
Does applying ideonomic methodology systematically reveal useful things that we would otherwise have been likely to miss?
This is the point at which ideonomy changes from an object of study into a working method.
Results from practice will inevitably feed back into mapping and reconstruction.
5. Mechanise — Build an Ideonomic Engine
Only after ideonomic methods are sufficiently understood should serious computational formalisation begin.
The first experiments may be modest: representing individual organons as explicit procedures, structured prompts or algorithms.
Later work may investigate how a system could select appropriate organons, combine them, chain them, apply them recursively, compare their results and traverse relationships between ideas.
The long-term objective is the development of an AI-supported ideonomic engine capable of selecting and applying systematic ideonomic operations to arbitrary subjects and using their results to drive further investigation.
Its precise architecture should emerge from the research rather than being imposed upon it in advance.
Continuous Processes
Several activities operate throughout the project rather than forming separate stages.
OCR and Source Recovery
The source material will continue to be cleaned, corrected and made usable alongside the research.
It is neither necessary nor desirable to postpone investigation until every page of every notebook has been perfectly transcribed. Material can be examined more deeply as its condition permits, while the continuing OCR work gradually improves the available corpus.
Documentation
The project will be documented while it happens.
Discoveries, decisions, uncertainties, changes of interpretation, experimental results, failures and methodological developments will be recorded contemporaneously wherever practical.
This will create a genuine working record rather than a retrospective account reconstructed after the event.
Publishing
This website will progressively become both the public face and laboratory notebook of our project.
Publication will follow the research rather than dictate it.
This means that the website will initially contain only relatively simple material — the project overview, roadmap and Orange Map — and grow organically as research notes, organons, experiments, reconstructed methods and project history become ready for publication.
Capture — The Branch Register
We have already discovered that Ideonomy is unusually capable of producing intriguing side paths. Our own way of working has much the same tendency.
Potentially valuable ideas should not be discarded simply because they fall outside the immediate task. Neither should every interesting possibility be allowed to divert the project.
Such ideas will therefore be recorded in a Branch Register with enough context to preserve the thought, identify where it arose and record its significant connections.
The governing principle is:
Explore deliberately; capture serendipity; don’t confuse the two.
Review and Renew
This roadmap itself is provisional.
As understanding develops, priorities, terminology, methods and even the overall structure of the project may need to change.
The research process is therefore directional but recursive:
- Survey
- Map
- Reconstruct
- Practice
- Mechanise
does not mean that movement occurs only from top to bottom.
Practice may expose a weakness in reconstruction.
Reconstruction may reveal missing information requiring further mapping. Another notebook may alter conclusions drawn from Orange. Attempts at mechanisation may expose ambiguities that require a return to the original material.
Revision is therefore part of the methodology rather than evidence that the roadmap has failed.