Design for Emergence
Understanding Emergence in Complex Systems
In complexity science, 'emergence' refers to the phenomenon where the interactions of individual components in a complex system generates novel patterns, behaviour, or qualities. These outcomes can’t be understood by isolating individual components. For example, 'market bubbles' cannot be explained by looking at a singular individual, but instead arise from the interactions of market participants. Local interactions create global patterns, these global patterns in turn affect local interactions.
Emergent outcomes cannot be predicted, in the same way we cannot know what will eventuate at a party; emergence can be full of both lovely and nasty surprises. Unfortunately, most organisations have a hard time accepting surprises. Dominated by “classical” or Cartesian mode of thinking, they assume that we can fully understand the world by breaking it down into its basic elements and properties, and that every change can be predicted by fixed laws of nature. This way of thinking also suggests that knowledge of the external world can be represented objectively in the mind through observation.
The Struggle Between Management and Reality
Designers recognise the mismatch in Cartesian practices and reality, as organisations attempt to control a complex, living system. We feel trapped in a theatre of research performances and certainty-artefacts that rationalise design through reduction. Narratives strip creative potential to singular use cases and personas, despite the abundance of evidence for the diversity of behaviours, motivations, and contexts. We’re driven to the cleanliness of simplification, evidenced in the attempted modelling of complex behaviours for prediction. Regardless of our desires for control, consistency, and certainty, we continue to be met with emergence. In a complex system, the only thing we can predict with certainty is emergence.
Embracing Design for Emergence
To better acknowledge that some things have a logic that we do not understand, we can design for emergence. When we design for emergence, we make decisions for the future not on probabilities but on possibilities. We use loosely held, but explicitly made assumptions to go beyond the Western binary of True-False, to shift our concern to Constraint-Affordance. In designing for emergence, we don’t try to solve a problem, we aim to positively shift a system’s state, guided by epistemic humility.
More on this to come…
"Nu descendant un escalier n° 2" (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp.
