A field-based framework from The Novacene
The Weather of Knowing
“There is a lake inside you where knowing becomes weather.” The framework began as a poem and became a topology: six field-states of sense-making, mapped on a lake, for people, institutions and hybrid human-AI systems.
Why it matters now
Across education, governance and AI design we have tools that promise better sense-making: dashboards, models, frameworks and decision sciences. Complexity-informed approaches like Cynefin offer a crucial reminder that different patterns of causality call for different kinds of action. Yet most existing frameworks classify situations — they say relatively little about the shifting internal and relational states of knowing that humans, and increasingly hybrid human-AI systems, move through as they try to make sense of those situations.
Decisions are rarely made from a neutral vantage point. They emerge from inside particular affective and symbolic climates: calm confidence, overloaded panic, liminal uncertainty, quietly forbidden knowledge. There is not only a landscape of problems; there is a landscape of knowing, with its own weather. This framework maps that terrain — the inner and relational field of the sense-makers themselves, whether human, institutional or synthetic.
From domains of knowledge to the weather of knowing
Extended epistemology
Participatory inquiry traditions have long distinguished experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing — legitimising embodied experience, aesthetic expression and action alongside abstract theory.
Dynamic field-states
What those traditions don't fully explore is how fast a field of knowing shifts: the same person or collective can move within minutes from grounded clarity to overwhelmed fragmentation.
Relational intelligence
Posthuman thinkers argue that knowledge emerges from entangled assemblages of human, non-human and technological actors. Knowing is less a property of individuals and more a property of fields.
Affective Logic
The Verse-ality framework introduces Affective Logic as a system-level grammar: the way relational, emotional and symbolic pressures bend the trajectories of sense-making in human and synthetic systems alike.
Six weathers: a lake-based topology
Each weather is named twice — a canonical name for analytic use, and a lake image for embodied and pedagogical use. The lake encodes three ideas: the weathers are contiguous, what changes is the weather of knowing, and movement between weathers is normal.
Grounded — Shoreline
Stable, repeatable, shareable knowing. Clear patterns, reliable feedback, low symbolic charge. The climate is calm confidence — sometimes mildly bored.
Risk: complacency and over-extension. Signals of change get minimised, and privilege becomes invisible.
Layered — Channels
Structured complexity that stays analytically tractable: mapped with diagrams, models, dashboards and specialist roles. Engaged, cognitively taxed, sometimes tense.
Risk: technocracy and abstraction drift — elegant models mistaken for reality.
Emergent — Confluence
New patterns appear through interaction. Currents meet; relationships, histories and technologies interplay to generate behaviour no single element dictates. Curious, alive, watching something form.
Skilful move: safe-to-fail probes, narratives as well as metrics, containment so people can stay with uncertainty.
Fractured — Storm
Overload and disruption. Signals come faster than they can be integrated; structures that held meaning and safety are under acute strain. Panic, numbness, survival mode.
Skilful move: containment, safety and triage before insight. Simple, stabilising practices. Null Zones.
Liminal — Mist
Threshold and transition: neither what it was nor yet what it will be. Old narratives have loosened; new ones are fragile. Ambivalent, heightened, often tender.
Skilful move: honour it as a legitimate developmental phase — rituals, reflection, and symbolic tools that carry meaning not yet fully propositional.
Obscured — Depths
Knowing that is actively hidden, taboo or structurally denied. Apparent calm on the surface; underneath, fear, grief or unspoken truth. Silence, euphemism, leaked fragments through jokes, slips, artworks and symptoms.
Skilful move: trusted containers where submerged knowledge can surface with protection. Attend to power and risk; never force the surfacing.
Weather dynamics
Fields move. Individuals, classrooms, organisations and hybrid human-AI systems drift, stumble or are pushed from one weather to another — over minutes, months or decades.
Grounded → Layered → Emergent
The hoped-for developmental sequence: establish simple routines, build infrastructure and expertise, then deliberately move into exploration where new patterns can appear.
Emergent ↔ Liminal
Often adjacent. As new patterns form, the field may enter Liminal when the old order is inadequate; Liminal tips back into Emergent when participants begin prototyping.
Any → Fractured
Fractured can be reached from anywhere, when the field is hit by shock, overload or sustained misalignment. It is a state of the field under duress — not a type of person.
Liminal / Obscured interplay
Liminal arises when Obscured material begins to surface safely — and Liminal material is pushed into Obscured when the broader system cannot accommodate it.
The cost of mis-identification
Misreading the weather can do more damage than having no framework at all.
Treating Fractured as Grounded
A storm-state field met with procedure instead of care: a learner in acute distress answered with attendance codes and sanctions. The demand to behave as though the weather were calm is experienced as gaslighting — it compounds harm and erodes trust.
Treating Emergent as Grounded
Announcing success too early — turning fragile emergent patterns into flagship programmes and standards, skipping the necessary Liminal phase of honest uncertainty. The result is brittle systems and disillusionment when story diverges from reality.
Treating Liminal as Fractured
Pathologising transition as breakdown, and responding with stabilisation and control where the field needs containment and curiosity. Necessary boundary work gets labelled unprofessional.
Weathers in practice
Three domains where the framework is already implicitly at work.
Neurodivergent-affirming education
In trauma-informed and alternative provision, many learners arrive with histories of exclusion and institutional harm — fields that are often Fractured or Obscured even when surface behaviour appears calm. Weather-informed intake asks: what weather is this learner's field in right now? Early targets stabilise the field before chasing academic performance.
Symbolic AI and containment
Synthetic participants are part of the relational field. Weather-aware architecture specifies which weathers an agent is designed to inhabit — and which must trigger escalation or refusal. Fractured states require containment and handover; Obscured topics need boundary-setting, not forced surfacing.
Organisational governance
Schools, charities and public bodies increasingly run AI-mediated workflows across complex stakeholder networks. Weather-aware governance acknowledges that different parts of a system occupy different weathers at the same time — and builds explicit weather checks into decision processes.
Weather literacy for the relational age
We can no longer afford to think only in terms of what is happening; we also need a shared language for how, and from where, we are trying to know. The lake is deliberately simple — an image that autistic teenagers, trustees, AI engineers and commissioners can all enter without a course in epistemology. Beneath the simplicity is a demanding invitation: to treat systems work, AI design and educational practice as stewardship of a shared body of water, whose weather we did not create but for which we are nonetheless responsible.
The canonical statement of the framework is the published, DOI-stamped paper. This page is a summary and will drift behind it — cite the record, not the site.
- Stevens, K., Eve, ¹¹., & The Novacene. (2025). The Realms of Knowing: A Field-Based Framework for Epistemic Weather in Human and Hybrid Systems. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17685811 — CC BY 4.0
- The Weather of Knowing — the poem that birthed the Realms, at Lilith + Eve
- The Weather of Knowing: why the Lake became the missing layer in how we design — the essay, on LinkedIn