Solving for Pattern

“Why is designing difficult?” asked John Chris Jones in his prescient 1970 book, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures. “The fundamental problem is that designers are obliged to use current information to predict a future state that will not come about unless their predictions are correct.”

Jones, whose early work was in industrial design, cited numerous design descriptions and definitions (e.g., J. K. Page: “the imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities”) before settling on “the initiation of change in man-made things.”

The main difficulty in any form of designing is that of coping with the complexity of a huge search space filled with millions of alternative combinations of possible sub-components. … Clearly we need ‘multi-professional’ designers and planners whose intuitive leaps are informed by knowledge and experience of changes at all levels from community action to component design. Equally, we need new methods that provide sufficient perceptual span at each of these levels.

He surveyed 35 such methods. Some notes from Method 5.4: Systems Transformation:

Aim
To find ways of transforming an unsatisfactory system so as to remove its inherent faults.

Outline
1. Identify the inherent faults of the existing system.
2. Identify the reasons for the existence of these faults.
3. Search for new kinds of system components capable of removing the inherent faults.
4. Find a sequence of changes (a transformation route, or evolutionary pathway) that would allow the existing components to evolve into the new ones.

Comments
It is easy to imagine the transformation of a design situation but much more difficult to carry it out. This is because, in changing the components of a system, one is changing the things upon which its stability depends, and with it, the stability of many people’s beliefs, jobs and expectations.

Not the kind of design-for-engagement methods that would be cataloged in, say, Peggy Holman and coauthors’ The Change Handbook — but fascinating nonetheless.

In “Network Cosmology,” a new Nature Scientific Reports paper, Dmitri Krioukov and coauthors find similarities between the growth dynamics and structures of complex networks and those of an expanding universe. Krioukov is at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, University of California, San Diego.

From the press release:

By performing complex supercomputer simulations of the universe and using a variety of other calculations, researchers have now proven that the causal network representing the large-scale structure of space and time in our accelerating universe is a graph that shows remarkable similarity to many complex networks such as the Internet, social, or even biological networks.

From the paper:

[W]e show that the causal network representing the large-scale structure of spacetime in our accelerating universe is a power-law graph with strong clustering, similar to many complex networks such as the Internet, social, or biological networks. We prove that this structural similarity is a consequence of the asymptotic equivalence between the large-scale growth dynamics of complex networks and causal networks. This equivalence suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of complex networks and spacetime in the universe, with implications to network science and cosmology.

This research approach reminds me of the Society for General System Research and its aim (1954): “to investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws, and models in various fields, and to help in useful transfers from one field to another.”

As described by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory (1968):

A consequence of the existence of general system properties is the appearance of structural similarities or isomorphisms in different fields. There are correspondences in the principles that govern the behavior of entities that are, intrinsically, widely different. To take a simple example, an exponential law of growth applies to certain bacterial cells, to populations of bacteria, of animals or humans, and to the progress of scientific research measured by the number of publications in genetics or science in general. The entities in question, such as bacteria, animals, men (sic), books, etc., are completely different, and so are the causal mechanisms involved. Nevertheless, the mathematical law is the same.

H/t @Bigmind

The nonprofit SOLVE and the Pacific Northwest College of Art Collaborative Design program are seeking creative and pragmatic ideas for tackling a perennial challenge: keeping Oregon’s beaches of free of marine debris, from micro-plastics to floating docks.

The Clean Beaches Design Challenge offers up to $3,000 in prizes. Entries are due January 31, 2013.

More information and the challenge brief pdf.

Photo by Laura DeVito

“The great mistake that we make,” says Wendell Berry, “is when we assume that the land can be abused to improve the people — or that the people can be abused to improve the land.”

Berry spoke last week on the Diane Rehm show about his new collection of stories, and about his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, “It all turns on affection,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

From the radio interview:

I think the polarization between economy and conservation has been a tragedy. It is in fact possible to use land without destroying it. Our idea that we could maintain the integrity of nature — the integrity of the ecoshpere — by preserving so-called wilderness areas seems to me an error. If we preserve nature there, while we destroy it in (what i would call) the economic landscapes, eventually we are going to destroy it all. The task — and it is a doable and practical task … is to bring our economic life into line with the demands of the ecosphere and the local ecosystems.

From the Jefferson Lecture:

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely ‘subjective,’ and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing.

Following Berry’s talk, NEH Chairman Jim Leach assured the audience:

Thank you Wendell Berry for presenting a thought-provoking perspective on the importance of love and affection in the social life of our country. But as an official of the United States government, I’m obligated to note that these views are those of the speaker and do not reflect those of the United States government or any agency thereof.

Radio podcast here. Jefferson Lecture text here. Jefferson Lecture video here.

“I study the way shapes develop,” says Norwegian artist Tone Kristin Bjordam. “I work in a very measured way and plan everything in advance. But the fun and exciting part is what happens by chance.”

Her movie Critical Transitions is a collaboration with ecologist Marten Scheffer, who also composed the music soundtrack.

An October 2012 paper  in Science by Scheffer and 11 coauthors (“Anticipating Critical Transitions,” sub. req.) studies such thresholds (or tipping points or bifurcations) from two angles: What are the structural features of systems with thresholds? (Answer: connectivity and homogeneity) Are there indicators of proximity to thresholds? (Answer: It depends. For some, a slowdown in activity, for some others, rising disorder.)

See also:

• Scheffer’s Netherlands-based SparcS research center
• The early warning signal toolbox
• A Scientific American post, “What Are the Warning Signs of Tipping Points?“

H/t Mike Jones

Imagine that you are in high school, preparing for a test in mathematics or physics or history. You take the test and do very poorly. Every answer wrong. Would that preparation of yours still count as “learning”?

Seems ludicrous. Surely, if learning is to have some meaning, it must be in relation to the development of proficiency or competence or effectiveness.

So simple? Maybe. How about if we acknowledge that notions of proficiency and competence and effectiveness are socially constructed and, especially in socio-political situations, often contested.

“You probably know that the earth is round and that it is in orbit around the sun,” writes learning theorist Etienne Wenger in the 2000 paper, “Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems.”

But how do you know this? What does it take? Obviously, it takes a brain in a living body, but it also takes a very complex social, cultural, and historical system, which has accumulated learning over time. … In this sense, knowing is an act of participation in complex ‘social learning systems’. …

In a social learning system, competence is historically and socially defined. How to be a physicist or how to understand the position of the earth in the universe is something that scientific communities have established over time. Knowing, therefore, is a matter of displaying competences defined in social communities. The picture is more complex and dynamic than that, however. Our experience of life and the social standards of competence of our communities are not necessarily, or even usually, congruent. We each experience knowing in our own ways. Socially defined competence is always in interplay with our experience. It is in this interplay that learning takes place.

Wenger describes three scales: the reality of the astronomical situation, the historically and socially defined competence, and our personal experiences. In terms of the earth’s orbit, it’s safe to assume that contemporary scientific competence approximates the reality, but in other areas of astronomy there are still unknowns: dark matter and black holes and so on. And many of us have little personal experience to draw upon.

When we examine situations closer to home, complexities multiply. Consider river basin management, a frequent topic in the literature on social learning. In a climate-changing world, any river’s future water abundance is uncertain. Competence is not the sole province of scientists; expertise is diffuse. Experiences vary widely. And the topic itself is value laden. The process of adaptive management prescribes treating management actions as experiments. If a diverse group of participants can deliberate and reflect on these experiments, perhaps a process of social learning will take place, with each person learning in the interplay between individual experience and an evolving social competence. And perhaps, over time, these experiments and this learning will enable increasingly effective management actions, with regard to deliberated goals.

That’s my current thinking on social leaning in an environmental context, following my reading of Wenger. Here are two other recent approaches, both from the resilience literature.

In a thoughtful 2010 Ecology and Society paper, “What is Social Learning?,” Mark Reed and ten coauthors propose:

[S]ocial learning may be defined as a change in understanding that goes beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units or communities of practice through social interactions between actors within social networks.

And in an insightful 2011 book, Collaborative Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to Opportunity, Ryan Bullock, Derek Armitage, and Bruce Mitchell contribute a chapter that proposes:

[Social learning is defined as] the iterative action, reflection, and deliberation of individuals and groups engaged in the sharing of experiences and ideas to collaboratively resolve complex challenges.

The “change in understanding” described by Mark Reed and coauthors posits no relationship to social competence, whereas the “iterative action, reflection, and deliberation” of Ryan Bullock and coauthors does imply such a relationship, and thus seems closer to my own sense of social learning. With a tricky concept like learning, language development functions as an experiment in itself.

Nonetheless, my concerns about defining learning without some relationship to competence were realized when Mark Reed’s paper was cited in a 2011 Nature Climate Change article on carbon capture and storage (CCS), “Learning lessons on carbon storage” (sub. req.) by David Reiner:

Social learning involves a change in understanding not just by an individual, but by wider social ‘units’ such as communities or particular sections of society, and it occurs through social interactions and processes such as media reporting [Reed et al. 2010]. It can involve learning about technical facts — such as how CCS works or its safety record — but the transfer of knowledge is not restricted to direct experience and involves a much wider audience than technical learning. The way in which it occurs is highly context-specific. In the case of CCS plants, it will depend on factors such as the plant’s location, the economic and social characteristics of the community around it, and the political context in which it is operating. Consequently, social learning will require extensive stakeholder engagement, through processes such as public consultations, surveys or education programmes, all of which require significant investments of both time and money.

Now, the process of carbon capture and storage remains controversial, as evidenced for example in this 2011 Economist debate. So I would think that declarations of learning are premature, as learning does seem to imply a relationship to competence, and we are hopeful that competence will approximate effectiveness. In effect, the author’s citation of Reed et al. allows re-framing of what would often be called simply knowledge transfer, or even marketing.

In this context, it’s also worth considering the types of public participation described in the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation.

I’ve been revisiting these topics in thinking about my talk at this week’s Open Planning Tools Symposium on “Describing and assessing potential benefits 
of participatory spatial planning.”

Mark Reed and I discussed social learning in the comment threads to two blog posts that followed the 2010 release of his paper: one at Resilience Science and one at People and Place (link removed, as P&P is gone).

“The design problem is: How do I get from time zero to time future?” says Harvard professor of landscape architecture and planning Carl Steinitz.

Steinitz is author of A Framework for Geodesign: Changing Geography by Design and this talk is from the 2010 GeoDesign Summit.

There are two strategies. One strategy is design — or imagine, if you will — the future. Go right from now to the future, and then try to figure out: How do I get it done? And the second strategy is design a scenario based on the present and ask: In what future might it result?

Those are the two strategies. But there are five methods. … And I call them anticipatory (holistic, deductive); sequential (direct, abductive); combinatorial (simultaneous, inductive); constraining (sensitivity, experimental); and optimizing (directed, objective driven). …

Designing something is an art. It requires judgment. It is not a science, although it depends on science. There are no perfect formulae, but there are methods. There is no universal toolkit, but there are tools. And you cannot copy an example, but you can gain experience.

See also: an interview in Engaging Cities online magazine

If we can put a person on the moon, why can’t we… feed the world? Put an end to poverty? Or?

As this figure shows, these questions exhibit a kind of category error, mistaking complex problems for the merely complicated.

It is redrawn from from the 2007 book Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman, and Michael Quinn Patton.

They write:

Disasters can occur when complex issues are managed or measured as if they are merely complicated or even simple. For example, our current approaches to dealing with mental illness focus on engineering the correct psycho-pharmaceutical intervention to fix the problem. The fact that many patients are too ill to adhere to their proscribed drug regimens is ignored as it demands of our specialists a level of interaction and adjustment most are not equipped to deliver. A new layer of expertise develops around forcing compliance to the drug regimens rather than crafting regimens and support systems that respond to the needs and circumstances of the patient.

Similarly, we organize our schools to be efficient in supplying education to large numbers and largely unresponsive to the wide range of learning styles and capacities that we know exists. Then we diagnose those who cannot learn efficiently as suffering from learning disorders and attempt to treat them, not the system.

Both of these are examples of addressing apparently intractable problems, crying out for social innovation, with methods, tools, approaches and mindsets that are appropriate for complicated situations. And while at times such an approach can give us a measure of false security, inevitably it gets us into trouble.

Image design: Rocketeye

Corporations are not people, as voters in eight states insisted yesterday on a range of 2012 local and state ballot initiatives.

The nonprofit Move to Amend has a full tally, on which majorities range from 52% to 85%. One example:

Montana’s Initiative 166, Stand with Montanans, establishes an official Montana policy that corporations are not people with constitutional rights and charges Montana’s elected officials with supporting a constitutional amendment to create a level playing field in campaign spending. Passed by 74.71%.

A recent film about clean elections is PRICELE$$. Here’s the trailer: