Hi Chuck,

Thank you  for your message.  I miss the conversations and arguments with
you. I'm sorry if what I wrote irritated you. I am using terms accurately
rather than emotionally. I realise you find the reasoning different from
what you normally use. Please accept that  I wrote what I wrote carefully.
I'd like to try again. Here goes..

There are some people who focus on 'things'. In reasoning, they focus on
nouns. In the sentence 'the cat sat on the mat',  they focus on the cat and
the mat. This is common. This noun-based way of viewing the world is usually
associated with a personal internal emphasis on a way of interacting with
the world that focuses on things, ownership and ego. Some of the results of
this emphasis on nouns are the kinds of language shift that converts
activities into nouns. An example is where people rephrase 'Chuck is
swimming (verb)' into 'Chuck is having 'a swim' (noun)'. The interesting
thing is that the verb 'swimming' makes good concrete sense in that people
can see you doing it, whereas the noun 'swim' is a purely ethereal abstract
entity. I.e. if I asked you to give me the 'swim' that you were having so
that I could look at it, it wouldn't make much sense.
In contrast are people that focus on activities rather than things. In
reasoning they focus on verbs. In the sentence 'the cat sat on the mat',
they focus primarily on the activity of 'sitting'. This verb-based way of
viewing the world is usually associated with personal internal emphasis on
interacting, doing and controlling.

Over the last few years, my interest has been in the design of interventions
in complex socio-technical systems. Looking at design in this way offers
many benefits. It dissolves many of the theory messes typical of the design
research literature, and there are huge advantages  in viewing all design
activity as interventions in complex socio-technical systems. This
perspective rewrites a lot of the existing design theory in a simpler more
integrated fashion. Complex socio-technical systems are small and large.
They range from global design and manufacturing and governance to the design
of a shopping list. They are complex in ways that exist beyond where design
theory usually treads. Below I've listed some of the characteristics of
complex socio-technical systems and an indication of the level of
abstraction of the type of analyses needed.

One of the problems of working in this area, however, is that conventional
design theory simply doesn't work in this realm. It doesn't have sufficient
theoretical competence. Nor does management theory. 

When analysing designs for interventions in complex socio-technical systems,
the primary focus is system behaviour - a verb-based way of viewing the
world. Why? Because you can draw subsystem boundaries anywhere and include
what you want and how you want it and call them what you like. Nothing
matters except how the system behaves (verb). A noun-based view of objects
has very little relevance. Choosing sub-system groups doesn't need to make
sense, they don't need to be accurately named (something like 'Group1b' is
as good as anything). They are transient ephemeral entities on the path to
understanding how the system behaves in response to changes. In contrast, an
activity-based, verb-based,  view of the system is everything. Attempting to
describe complex system behaviour by inventing a noun object ('a swim') is
pretty useless. It is only in the very most trivial systems that a system
behaviour can  be accurately and completely described by a fixed single code
(noun). A problem is that our natural laziness pushes us in that direction
of converting verbs about activity and behaviour into noun forms. 

It's easy to draw parallels to theorising about 'creativity'. Making theory
in the area of 'creativity/creating things' is theorising about
interventions in a complex socio-technical system. The noun-based approach,
i.e. using terms such as 'creativity' or 'innovation', is much like lumping
together things for the moment into a temporally convenient subsystem (Group
1B). The noun-based representations of complex activities don't  adequately
communicate an  accurate and complete description of the activity and how
things behave and change. That requires a verb-based approach. The recent
exchange of emails on this list following your post and the messy literature
on 'creativity' (and innovation) illustrate some of these issues.

Best wishes and thank you for the criticism,
Terry

===
Complex socio-technical systems comprise:
Multiple constituencies - changing over time
Multiple overlapping sub-systems
Complex sub-system behaviours dynamically changing over time
Multiple overlapping processes across subsystems
Mixed ownership of sub-systems
Varying purposes and roles of system and sub-systems 
Complex and dynamic distribution of formal and informal power and control
===
Conceptual level of designing interventions in complex socio-technical
systems (this list from a system variety perspective):
1. Level at which things happen 
2. Level at which people ordinarily plan what happens 
3. Level at which people analyse how people ordinarily plan what happens
(design research typically is at this level)
4. Basic systems models and systems thinking
5. Thinking about variety in systems and balance between control variety,
system variety and environment variety
6. Thinking about distribution of control, system and environment variety
across sub-systems and their conceptual representations
7. Thinking about the time and location of distributions of control, system
and environment varieties
8. Thinking about the dynamic shifts in power and control that result from
dynamics of change in time and location of control, system and environment
varieties. (Level of research into design of interventions into complex
socio-technical systems)
===