Dear Terry
Thanks a lot for the lead to Donnela Meadows's article, "Leverage Points:
Place to Intervene in a System". A good introduction to Systems approach.
And I strongly support your push for designers to adopt this whole, complex
systems view, instead of the current reductive, narrower
"local-suboptimisation" approach.
Perhaps ALL University design teaching curricula should include some
initiation course to 'Complex Systems' understanding, as one of my
professors tried a couple of years ago...
Warm Regards
Francois
Montreal
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 4:26 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Francois,
>
> Interventions aimed at changing a complex system can be more or less
> effective depending on the type of intervention, the aim of the
> intervention
> and the part of the system in which the intervention is applied.
>
> Lever points in a complex system are points in which interventions work
> more
> effectively. The interesting thing is that when non-systems approaches
> (think classic design methods and design thinking) are applied to complex
> systems, the design decisions are almost always faulty and commonly lead to
> the opposite outcomes!
>
> See for example, http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf
>
> This idea usually sits with 'counterintuitive' outcomes and
> 'local-suboptimisation'
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
>
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