complexity in design (abstract)
Designing is a heterogeneous, fuzzily defined, floating field of various activities and chunks of ideas and knowledge, aiming at transferring existing situations into preferred ones (Simon 1969). Available theories regarding the foundations of designing as presented in "the basic PARADOX" (Jonas and Meyer-Veden 2004) have evoked the impression of Babylonian confusion. We located the reasons for this "mess" in the "non-fit", which is the problematic relation of theories and subject field. There seems to be a comparable interface problem in theory-building as in designing itself.
"Complexity (theory)" sounds promising, but turns out to be a problematic and not really helpful concept. I will argue for a more precise application of systemic and evolutionary concepts instead, which - in my view - are able to model the underlying generative structures and processes that produce the visible phenomenon of complexity. It does not make sense to introduce a new fashionable meta-concept and to hope for a panacea before having clarified the more basic and still equally problematic older meta-concepts.
We have to ask: What is complexity? Is complexity in design the same as complexity in complexity theory? This would be great and should make things much easier, indeed. John Horgan, in his June 1995 Scientific American editorial entitled "From complexity to perplexity", mentions 31 definitions of complexity and points out the lack of a "unified theory".
One may argue that complexity is the result of the failure of the Newtonian Paradigm (which represents the world as simple mechanisms) to be generic and conclude that simple systems and complex systems are disjoint categories that encompass all of nature. Complexity thus may be defined as the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties. There are irreducible "knowledge gaps" showing up, and there will be no "unified theory" of complexity.
This paper will take one step away from "theories of what" (is designing) towards practice and doing and tries to have a closer look at existing process models or "theories of how" to design instead.
The systems concept in design as used in the ubiquitous "complex systems" appears to be rather simplistic. There is hardly any reference to the elaborate thermodynamic and biological theories of open / dissipative / closed systems, which explain how systems are able to keep a state of high order far from equilibrium, thus overcoming the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Systems concepts in design are mainly based on simplified applications of Wiener's cybernetics (1948), dealing with mechanisms of feedback, communication and control in goal-oriented processes. He explicitly warned of any hope that this approach could contribute to the healing of the diseases of society.
It was Weaver's concept of "organized complexity" (1948), which filled the obvious gap between the classical Newtonian concepts of "problems of simplicity" and "problems of disorganized complexity" and might have provided a powerful basis for dealing with complex social problems / design problems. This was his enthusiastic appeal for the next 50 years; but his programmatic approach was neglected in favour of computability and formal homogeneity (as in OR and later in the Design Methods Movement).
The present state of design research, which started in the 1980s and which I call the "Design Research Movement" still mainly follows the reductionist scientific paradigm and thus tends to neglect the systemic character of the design process.
Circularity, self-referentiality, and the concept of autopoietic closure in living and meaning-based systems establish the basic pragmatic learning cycle of acting and reflecting. This naturalistic conception of evolutionary epistemology is essential for my further argument concerning design processes.
More appropriate systems theories, as for example Luhmann´s theory of social systems (extending the biological concept of autopoiesis to psychic and social systems), and a generalized model of socio-cultural evolution, consisting of the 3 phases of variation / selection / re-stabilization, allow to specify more clearly the "knowledge gaps" inherent in the design process.
Design activities happen "in-between", in these gaps, they intervene into the relations of co-evolving autopoietic systems by means of creating artefacts that pretend to improve those relations. The basic problem is neither lacking individual creativity nor insufficient planning, but the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of communication in the environment of the artefacts.
To sum up: there are two basic problems related to systemic gaps:
(1) The gaps between autopoietic systems involved in designing. This is fundamental systemic "obstinacy", which is labelled or covered with the nice and common, but fuzzy terms "creativity", "subjectivity", "values", "trends", …
(2) The gaps between the evolutionary mechanisms involved in designing. Or: the future orientation of design activities. The artefact, once released, remains as it is. The environments of the artefact change in manners, which are in principle unpredictable.
"Complexity" is just another word for these phenomena.
These aspects have to be taken into account as constitutive of any attempt at theory-building in design, which can be characterized as a (nevertheless often successful) "practice of not-knowing".
I conclude, that comprehensive "unified" theories, or methods, or process models run aground on the identified knowledge gaps, which allow neither reliable models of the present, nor reliable projections into the future. Consolation may be found in performing a shift from the effort of adaptation towards strategies of exaptation, which means the development of stocks of alternatives for coping with unpredictable situations in the future. And design theory has to provide the conceptual meta-framework for this.
Maybe now we have a better idea, why "designing for people" (Jones 1970) or even "for the real world" (Papanek 197x), is so difficult: The entire real world has always been complex!
"Complexity (theory)" sounds promising, but turns out to be a problematic and not really helpful concept. I will argue for a more precise application of systemic and evolutionary concepts instead, which - in my view - are able to model the underlying generative structures and processes that produce the visible phenomenon of complexity. It does not make sense to introduce a new fashionable meta-concept and to hope for a panacea before having clarified the more basic and still equally problematic older meta-concepts.
We have to ask: What is complexity? Is complexity in design the same as complexity in complexity theory? This would be great and should make things much easier, indeed. John Horgan, in his June 1995 Scientific American editorial entitled "From complexity to perplexity", mentions 31 definitions of complexity and points out the lack of a "unified theory".
One may argue that complexity is the result of the failure of the Newtonian Paradigm (which represents the world as simple mechanisms) to be generic and conclude that simple systems and complex systems are disjoint categories that encompass all of nature. Complexity thus may be defined as the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties. There are irreducible "knowledge gaps" showing up, and there will be no "unified theory" of complexity.
This paper will take one step away from "theories of what" (is designing) towards practice and doing and tries to have a closer look at existing process models or "theories of how" to design instead.
The systems concept in design as used in the ubiquitous "complex systems" appears to be rather simplistic. There is hardly any reference to the elaborate thermodynamic and biological theories of open / dissipative / closed systems, which explain how systems are able to keep a state of high order far from equilibrium, thus overcoming the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Systems concepts in design are mainly based on simplified applications of Wiener's cybernetics (1948), dealing with mechanisms of feedback, communication and control in goal-oriented processes. He explicitly warned of any hope that this approach could contribute to the healing of the diseases of society.
It was Weaver's concept of "organized complexity" (1948), which filled the obvious gap between the classical Newtonian concepts of "problems of simplicity" and "problems of disorganized complexity" and might have provided a powerful basis for dealing with complex social problems / design problems. This was his enthusiastic appeal for the next 50 years; but his programmatic approach was neglected in favour of computability and formal homogeneity (as in OR and later in the Design Methods Movement).
The present state of design research, which started in the 1980s and which I call the "Design Research Movement" still mainly follows the reductionist scientific paradigm and thus tends to neglect the systemic character of the design process.
Circularity, self-referentiality, and the concept of autopoietic closure in living and meaning-based systems establish the basic pragmatic learning cycle of acting and reflecting. This naturalistic conception of evolutionary epistemology is essential for my further argument concerning design processes.
More appropriate systems theories, as for example Luhmann´s theory of social systems (extending the biological concept of autopoiesis to psychic and social systems), and a generalized model of socio-cultural evolution, consisting of the 3 phases of variation / selection / re-stabilization, allow to specify more clearly the "knowledge gaps" inherent in the design process.
Design activities happen "in-between", in these gaps, they intervene into the relations of co-evolving autopoietic systems by means of creating artefacts that pretend to improve those relations. The basic problem is neither lacking individual creativity nor insufficient planning, but the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of communication in the environment of the artefacts.
To sum up: there are two basic problems related to systemic gaps:
(1) The gaps between autopoietic systems involved in designing. This is fundamental systemic "obstinacy", which is labelled or covered with the nice and common, but fuzzy terms "creativity", "subjectivity", "values", "trends", …
(2) The gaps between the evolutionary mechanisms involved in designing. Or: the future orientation of design activities. The artefact, once released, remains as it is. The environments of the artefact change in manners, which are in principle unpredictable.
"Complexity" is just another word for these phenomena.
These aspects have to be taken into account as constitutive of any attempt at theory-building in design, which can be characterized as a (nevertheless often successful) "practice of not-knowing".
I conclude, that comprehensive "unified" theories, or methods, or process models run aground on the identified knowledge gaps, which allow neither reliable models of the present, nor reliable projections into the future. Consolation may be found in performing a shift from the effort of adaptation towards strategies of exaptation, which means the development of stocks of alternatives for coping with unpredictable situations in the future. And design theory has to provide the conceptual meta-framework for this.
Maybe now we have a better idea, why "designing for people" (Jones 1970) or even "for the real world" (Papanek 197x), is so difficult: The entire real world has always been complex!
jonasw - 2005/08/26 08:38
