Our principal Research Centre, “MaMI,” is pivotal to all our work at Interchange Research, both pure and applied. It is dedicated to scientific research in metamorphology, the science of change or, more strictly, “the study of transformation in nature and in human affairs,” as well as conducting ceaseless R&D, progressively refining and enhancing our proprietary technology of Minimalist Intervention which has emerged from our metamorphological investigations and discoveries in hundreds of man-years of scientific work.

The word “metamorphology,” admittedly not a pretty word, comes from the Greek “metamorphosis,” the equivalent of the Latin “transformation.” The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that a century ago it was applied to the study of “change of form” solely in the context of post-embryonic ontogenesis, a field of research, along with embryology proper, from which emerged many of the concepts central to our work, and one of the scientific fields in which our own in-house work in Interchange began in the early 1970s.

Today “metamorphology” refers more broadly to the study of transformation in general—the emerging science of change. More specifically, over the past century metamorphology (avant la lettre), has focused on the ubiquitous phenomena of ‘directiveness’ in nature and in human affairs. The rigorous study of these natural phenomena—including inter alia change, control, ontogenesis, evolution, adaptation, purpose, intervention, and design—has given rise to powerful new scientific concepts and methods of analysis.

Metamorphology provides the theoretical basis of our core methodology of Minimalist Intervention, enabling one to identify, predictably and reliably, the smallest intervention into any system that will trigger an all-or-none flip from the existing state of the system to some specific desired state and no other, all at once, with nothing in between, and with absolute precision. This was the very problem Interchange set out to solve half a century ago.

For any biological assembly, the perception of, and differential response to change is fundamental. But change, a difference over time, is relative to point of view and a function of description, and can only be theoretically accommodated within nature if we include within nature a cluster of fundamental concepts traditionally excluded.

This has had far-reaching consequences for our conception of the physical universe and of mind, as well as yielding powerful practical applications in deliberately creating major transformations through small, precisely pinpointed interventions in the world of affairs.

To state the matter somewhat informally, for any assembly a (which may be anything from a person or organism to a cell or receptor) to perceive or respond to a change in some particular p, a must at the very least detect a descriptive difference in some pattern or invariance of p—a descriptive difference in pattern, moreover, which is of significance from a’s point of view.

The development of the theoretical foundations of metamorphology took off rapidly when ways were eventually found to rigorously reformulate and include such concepts as point of view, description, significance, pattern, context and intervention (to name a few) within our understanding of the physical mechanics of the universe, on a par with such notions as matter and energy, space and time.

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