Ken's excellent review of the complexity language and its role in design draws attention to an important point:
It is hard to understand the history without a background in mathematics.
This particularly applies to understanding the prior work on design for simplicity in complex situations.
In recent times (50 years ago) the origins of complexity theory and looking for simplification to use in design has a strong origin in Operations Research and its use of mathematics.
Another origin of simplification in complexity theory is in the design of control systems - particularly using the mathematics of what later became called non-linear control theory. The ideas of simplification for design in complexity, however, has been commonplace in the mathematics of contemporary engineering design for at least a century. A classic example is Nyquist Stability criterion and Nyquist plot developed in the 1930s.
Further back in time , the idea of using simplification to better understand and design complex situations can be seen in the work of al-Khwarizmi and his developments in algebra in the 8th century. In this case, the mathematics provided the representation of the situations and the algebra methods provided the design tools to achieve simplified understanding via those representations.
Mathematics is a key to understanding simplification in design of complex situations and offers great potential for other non-technical areas of design.
The challenge, as Ken has pointed to, is achieving a usable translation for designers of the large body of decades of existing mathematically-based knowledge in areas offering simplification of complexity for designers.
A shortcut for designers that seems to be emerging in this space is the use of big data analysis tools such as those made available via the IBM Watson projects and the increased access of easy to use AI offered by IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Regards,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
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Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
Perth, Western Australia
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Sunday, 18 February 2018 6:12 PM
To: PhD-Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Case-making (Reply to Don Norman 20 Jan)
Dear Mike and Don,
Both your posts made sense to me, for different reasons. I’d like to add a few thoughts on complexity, complexity theory, and design.
Don is both right and wrong in saying that dictionaries look backward to establish historical usage. That’s right in exact terms — but this requires a nuanced understanding. The great dictionaries compile usage exemplars on an ongoing basis, continually updating and expanding. The Oxford English Dictionary has a corpus of two billion words (2,000,000,000). By 1996, Merriam-Webster’s was up to sixteen million (16,000,000) usage citations. I’d expect this has grown in the era of digital linguistics.
All usage exemplars have been published, so they are necessarily a fragment of the historical record. At the same time, lexicographers want to know that a significant group of living users share a word in common — many usages appear and vanish again, so the record plays a role in establishing the fact that a word plays a genuine part in the living language.
The case of the word “complexity” seems to be different. Neither the OED nor M-W has updated the word to show the specific compound usage “complexity theory” — a term that has been current since at least the late 1980s. I’m not sure why that is. The current compound usage of the word complexity in complexity theory is well established.
Complexity theory grew from several roots to become a major scientific discipline. These include systems theory, biology, sociology, physics, economics, mathematics, cybernetics, and the work of interdisciplinary researchers who investigated chaos. While people in many fields worked on issues in complexity, this began to come together in the 1980s. By 1984, some of the leading thinkers in these different fields established The Santa Fe Institute to work on transdisciplinary problems in complexity theory:
https://www.santafe.edu
The institute web site describes many useful publications, and it makes many working papers available in .pdf format. The history of the institute describes the issues that interest institute members. It appears here:
https://www.santafe.edu/about/history
By 1992, Mitchell Waldrop published a widely read popular book, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. While somewhat dated in historical terms, it’s a well written book that continues to be useful in understanding the issues involved in complexity science.
https://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Emerging-Science-Order-Chaos/dp/0671767895
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complexity-Emerging-Science-Order-Chaos/dp/0671872346
But all of this is irrelevant to most designers. When I was a professor of management, there was serious interest in using complexity theory to understand problems in management, operations theory, organization theory, and other fields. I soon found that this could be an extremely promising avenue — for people with mathematical skills far more advanced than I possessed. It was through complexity that I first met Michael Lissack of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence. Michael is now a visiting professor at Tongji University at an Associate Editor of She Ji. Michael is among the people who work on the issues of complexity theory and design. You can learn more about ISCE here:
http://www.isce.edu/index.html
As Don mentioned, there is an institute at Northwestern University dealing with similar challenges as a collaborative venture between the schools of engineering and management:
https://www.nico.northwestern.edu
One of the projects in this group is the Visual Thinking Lab, an area of interest to designers:
http://visualthinking.psych.northwestern.edu
For myself, I long ago gave up trying to work with complexity theory. There are excellent scholars whose work uses complexity to shed light on problems that I can address in such fields as organization design or social design — for example, Robert Axelrod. Their ability to translate advanced mathematical theory into English makes the field useful to me. But I can’t myself do the mathematical work required. In the past, this has been the case for most people involved in design — many years ago, there was a conference titled The Challenge of Complexity at Aalto University, when it was still UIAH University of Art and Design Helsinki. I came to talk about complexity theory — I was astonished to discover that most of the people at the conference had no idea when I was talking about, not even at my primitive level. Most of the participants were talking about complicated artifacts and how design would solve the problem of working with those complicated artifacts. The conference did lead to one good result for me. I restructured my paper for the conference book as a chapter titled “Design Science and Design Education” on the need and value of better research training and on why designers can benefit from a better understanding of the social and natural sciences:
https://www.academia.edu/250736/Friedman._1997._Design_Science_and_Design_Education
As I see it, we are slowly reaching a point where more people in design research actually can work with complexity theory, or with the lessons of complexity theory. These are often the people who come to design from other fields such as physics (P. J. Stappers), psychology (Paul Hekkert, Peter Jones), or management and economics (Michael Lissack). We are also seeing younger designers and design scholars with an interdisciplinary background whose work addresses these issues in different forms, though not always using the language of complexity theory — people such as Carlos Teixeira, Luke Feast, Maria Camacho, Mitchell Sipus, or Lucy Kimbell. The material in the Research in Systems Design network also inhabits part of this domain. It would be interesting to see a stream of published work that shows us how to apply complexity theory to design.
BUT as Don says, his book Living with Complexity doesn’t focus on complexity, and it has nothing to do with complexity theory. Don focuses on simplicity — that is, he focuses on how people can live with complexity.
I, too, will put in a word for Per Mollerup’s profound book on Simplicity:
https://www.amazon.com/Simplicity-Matter-Design-Mollerup/dp/9063694024
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Simplicity-Matter-Design-Mollerup/dp/9063694024
One can see how Mollerup puts the principles of simplicity to work for design practice in his marvelous book, Data Design. At this moment, Amazon.com has a deep discount on paperback copies of Data Design, while Amazon.co.uk has new paper copies from other UK suppliers at a bargain price:
https://www.amazon.com/Data-Design-Visualising-Quantities-Connections/dp/1408191873
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Data-Design-Visualising-Quantities-Connections/dp/1408191873
By now, I’ve written enough. I’ll come back another time to discuss footnotes and references.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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