NB. This is not a dictionary, and these are not definitions in general use. Consider these words as terms of art used to think about, make, and market special things. These materials will appear, in slightly different form, in The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products, by Lee Devin and Robert D. Austin, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Suggestions and additions gratefully considered.

Abductive
Charles Sanders Pierce: Processes that aim to understand the second final cause, value, must begin with the idea that things reveal their purpose only through the unfolding of events.

Affective significance
The structural potential, intrinsic to the thing, to create affect.

Antecedents
Materials from before that are similar to those you’re presently considering.

Anticipation
The structural impetus toward a future. Not an action by you, but a feature of plotted materials.

Apophenia
To see connection or pattern among random data and ascribe meaning that isn’t there.

Back
A relationship of similarity between the focus of your attention and its antecedents.

Beginning, Middle, End
In Poetics, Aristotle’s scheme for considering the unity created by the repetition of parts of a tragedy. A beginning has nothing before it,  a middle and an end after; a middle has something before it and something after it; an end has something before it and nothing after.

Category
A mental box to put an idea or product in so as to collect similar things.

Category comparisons
A crude way to predict (You hope!) the success of one thing based on the success of something in the same or a nearby category.

Closure
Simple: the ending satisfies your expectations.

Complex: the ending surprises your expectations, but on reflection appears more appropriate and more interesting than they were. Romeo and Juliet die, even as you hoped they would survive; but shortly you see that they couldn’t have lived, based on who they were, what they wanted, and what they did. And this is dramatic structure, not psychology.

Conceive/reconceive
Conceive: To make in imagination a coherent thing out of data and other materials. As when you contemplate a special thing to puzzle out, conceive, its form

Reconceive: to take in new material and in combination with your own material, make or think up a new thing.

Coherence
A quality exhibited by a well plotted non-ordinary or special thing. The interdependent parts of such a thing achieve coherence on the basis of plotting. A coherent arrangement produces resonance among its interactive parts.

Consequences
The structural result of arranged action, thought, or other material. A relationship of similarity with antecedent materials.

Contemplation
The process of puzzling out (conceiving) a special form, discovery of the parts and their plotted inter-relationships.

Craftsmen
The persons, male and female, who realize designs in physical materials.

Creatives
Men and women presumed able to make new things; or to connect (unify) disparate ideas. Top-down management assumes (Creates?) an adversarial relationship between managers and creatives. Assume that all makers (managers, designers, craftsmen) are creatives.

Crowdsourcing
Involving the customer in creation of a new thing.

DNA
A metaphor for the history of a company and its products as that history guides current policy and behavior.

Feeling words
Language we use to identify inner actions that we can’t describe. Used, for example, to tell about the “Oh, wow!” moment of intuition.

Forward
The relationship of similarity a pattern projects over possible futures.

Four causes
Aristotle’s comprehensive description of any made thing: why the thing is the way that it is.

Efficient cause: the energy that causes materials to become something they wouldn’t become naturally. Maker.

Material cause: those materials.

Formal cause: the ultimate shape (in space and time) of the new made thing.

Final cause: the reason for making the thing in the first place. Special things have two final causes: to be perfect; and, to create value.

Idea
The thing, conceived virtually, to a perfection unattainable in reality; often has mutually exclusive features; serves as a guide or template for thinking about and making special things.

Imitation
A thing made of materials that don’t make that thing without human intervention: a tree made of toothpicks, e.g., or a face made of paint.

Interdependent
The maker has plotted the parts of a special thing in tight relationship with each other; a change to one results in or requires changes in all the others. Asked to add 2 centimeters to the depth of a Bang & Olufsen TV chassis, David Lewis re-designed the whole thing, changing almost every dimension.

Intrinsic
Situated within the thing itself: e.g. unity is an intrinsic quality of a non-ordinary thing; nothing outside the thing contributes to its unity.

Intuition
An event in which you first apprehend a special thing in its entirety. The “Oh, wow!” moment. You know that thing is special, and you feel strongly about it, but you don’t yet know why.

Legs
A product that continues to create value for a long time has legs.  Kind of Blue, a best seller for 50+ years, has serious legs.

Magnitude
A thing’s appropriate size and complexity.

Maker
The human energy source that arranges materials into made things.

Manager
The maker primarily in charge of creating a workspace conducive to making special things.

Non-ordinary thing
A product plotted to achieve coherence with the accompanying resonance.

Objet d’art
A special thing made to only one final cause: to be perfect.

Pareidolia
To see something recognizable in vague imagery; the man in the moon, e.g.

Parts
Quantitative parts can be removed or shifted without essentially changing the thing. The cap on a Coke bottle.

Qualitative parts inhere in the thing itself, and can be removed or shifted only in imagination. The sexy curves of a Coke bottle. Note the unsuccessful efforts to make a bigger than six ounce Coke bottle.

Pattern
A sequence that repeats material from within itself or from elsewhere with a recognizable design based on a rule.

Plot
In Aristotle’s Poetics, the principle that organizes all the parts and qualities of a tragedy. The soul of tragedy. The quality a special thing has of being arranged. Not a thing, like a book page or a cup handle, but a quality, like color, or length, or coherence. The soul of design.

Realization
The moment of closure in a plot sequence.

Resonance
A metaphor from physics. The mysterious increase in magnitude achieved by coherent plotting of a non-ordinary thing: the thing appears greater than the sum of its parts because of the way their harmonic interactions reinforce each other.

Rule
The plot principle for a pattern. The rule for the pattern 2, 4, n…. can be “Counting by 2s,” “Multiplying by 2,” or “Squaring the last term.”

Self-referential
Construction organized by the thing itself; its parts relate and refer to each other, not to the world outside it, not to an independent standard.

Soul
Of special things, the underlying principle of organization: plot.

Special thing
A non-ordinary product that has a second final cause: to create value.

Tautology
A statement in which the conclusion is the same as the premise, making it appear redundant and useless. “The final cause of a special thing is to be that special thing.” In thinking about art and design, tautologies often create opportunities for insight otherwise unavailable.

Tragedy
A kind of dramatic performance, play, used by Aristotle as the chief example for his book about making. Probably the most complicated made thing he and his readership knew. Tragedies were the central feature of an annual holiday in Athens that celebrated religion, international trade, and domestic politics.

Trajectory
The directions in space and time proposed when two or more patterns relate to one another.

Shadow trajectory: directions in space and time that function beneath a larger, more evident arrangement of patterns.

Unity
The condition in which the parts of a made thing have a relationship of repetition or similarity to other parts. The sentence that begins and ends Finnegans Wake, e.g. It would be hard (Impossible?) to count the number of times the key words in that sentence are repeated in the huge text.

Workspace
The venue, created by a manager, in which others can make special things. Ideally, a managers plots a workspace to exhibit the qualities of a special thing.