Dear All,

The recent thread on design history brought issues forward that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days. Tim’s recent post raised an important question. If we’re going to put ideas forward, it is vital to engage with the issues and argumentation thatarise in response, even while making a case for our own ideas.

Tim’s critique of Terry is not that Terry put Johannes Preiser-Kapeller’s working paper forward as an example. Tim’s critique is that Terry did not draw out the exemplary lessons nor state his purpose in offering the paper. The paper was parachuted in as a link without an author’s name, without discussing the principles at issue, and without applying these principles to design history.

Tim offered a reasonable critique of the Preiser-Kapeller paper. His post got me thinking about the larger principle. Could we really make use of this approach to historical analysis – cliodynamics – for design history?

The answer is no. We can’t use it at the moment, and possibly not for some time to come. Let me explain why.

Tim referred several times to the name Turchin. This is Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at University of Connecticut. Turchin is a leader in the use of chaos theory and complexity studies applied to history. His work in the field of complexity is serious: he has also been a visiting professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

In 2003, Turchin coined the term “cliodynamics” to refer to the transdisciplinary studies of history through dynamic systems analysis. Turchin is also editor-in-chief of the journal Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. The University of California publishes this journal on its eScholarship web site.

The front page of the journal defines “‘Cliodynamics’ [as] a transdisciplinary area of research integrating historical macrosociology, economic history / cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.”

The Cliodynamics web site is:

http://escholarship.org/uc/irows_cliodynamics

It’s Turchin’s work and that of his colleagues that should be considered here, not Johannes Preiser-Kapeller. Preiser-Kapeller is primarily a medievalist using traditional research methods to examine Byzantine history. Prior to this working paper, he does not seem to make significant use of cliodynamics.

Turchin (2008: 35) published an article in Nature in which he explained the challenge and importance of cliodynamics: “What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms. This state of affairs is holding us back. We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems. Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage.”

Several issues emerge in discussions of cliodynamics. Diplomat Carleton Coon (2012: 3-8) speaks of these issues as an effort to grapple with “processes too complicated to explain.” Interestingly, Coon (2012: 4) gives the specific example of solving a design problem to eliminate smoke from interior stoves in Nepal. When new stoves eliminated the smoke, an unrecognized problem emerged: the smoke had kept termite populations at bay, and eliminating the smoke led to collapsing roofs.

Beyond unintended consequences, however, cliodynamics involves other issues. The most notableamong these is the need for large enough sets of examples and data sets to permit developing and testing tractable mathematical models. Researchers can use two forms of tests to examine historical models. One is prediction. Theother is retrodiction, testing the predictive model against real historical data to measure goodness of fit. Either way, one needs data sets and examples for comparison.

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann (2011) discusses the broad range of issues, challenges, and problems facingresearchers who want to model regularities in human affairs. The kinds of issues Gell-Mann raises suggest that it might be possible to model specificproblems in the development of designed artifacts – with a rich enough library of exemplars. It is probable, however, that this would only be true if we could identify enough exemplars of the designed artifacts in question to model the specific aspects we wish to examine with an appropriate sense of context. We can model languages, travel routes, or credit card transaction patterns because we map them to a relative degree of certainty. How would we know when we had accumulated a library of chairs sufficient to map the evolution of chair design with respect to specific design questions? This is quite a different problem than modelling the general evolution of the chair.

Turchin (2008: 36) argues for the value of cliodynamics while limiting its uses: “Cliodynamic theories will not be able to predict the future, even after they have passed empirical tests. Accurate forecasts are often impossible because of phenomena such asmathematical chaos, free will and the self-defeating prophecy. But we should be able to use theories in other, perhaps more helpful, ways: to calculate theconsequences of our social choices, to encourage the development of social systems in desired directions, and to avoid unintended consequences.”

This central founder of cliodynamics argues against the notion that robust historical models will permit predictions. As the physicist Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” That quote is also attributed to Yogi Berra, Will Rogers, and Mark Twain, and they were all quite right to say it.

With respect to design, such fields as cliodynamics are an interesting addition to the background knowledge we need to develop if we are to think more productively about design. It would not be a promising research method, at least not now.

Few of us have the advanced range of transdisciplinary skills needed for cliodynamic research – and we lack the libraries of exemplars and data sets that would permit the work required. It’s only just now that our field is seeing the first major basic research projects funded at any reasonable level. To understand how far we are from cliodynamics, it will help to understand what this means – and what sorts of resources this requires.

The largest basic research project to date in our field is Project UMA, funded with 1,500,000 Euros over five years by the Dutch National Science Organization. Paul Hekkert from the Technological University of Delft leads the project with Allan Whitfield from Swinburne University, Nathan Crilly from Cambridge University, and Helmut Lederer from University of Vienna. This team has the statistical and modelling skills totake on the challenge of cliodynamics and complexity theory. They are busy with Project UMA.

Someone like Goran Roos with a triple background in mathematical physics, management, and design might do so as well – he does some research as a professor here at Swinburne, but South Australia keeps him busy as Chairman of the Advanced Manufacturing Council of South Australia.

Across all design fields worldwide, we probably have fewer than one hundred people with the methodological skills needed for serious cliodynamic research. But we still don’t have the data. If you compare the available resources with the hundreds of millions of dollars invested over the past five decades on chaos theory, complexity theory, and complex dynamic systems, the difficulty of applying cliodynamics to design history becomes clear. Even so, it’s not clear that we need this kind of work.

While the mathematical modelling of design history through cliodynamics is difficult, I’d argue that cliodynamics would not capture the core problems of design history that we need to address at this time.

For most designers and researchers in design, history helps us to understand the past. We use history to develop a repertoire of useful, situated examples. History helps us to form a basis for ethical decisions based on what we know of others have done – their past actions and the consequences of their deeds. History shapes a conversation across generations. Again, I point to the excellent notes that Victor Margolin, Derek Miller, Kari Kuuti, and Don Norman posted to the list.

If the example of Preiser-Kapeller’s working paper was intended to suggest that we explore cliodynamics as a new discipline for design historians, I’d agree with Tim Smithers that there was no genuine explanation of the model, its uses, or its limits.

While it was an interesting issue for Terry Love to raise, Terry did not follow it through. Tim read and responded to the relatively modest value that the Preiser-Kapeller paper offers to our field. I’ve tried to address the uses of cliodynamics, while pointing to the limits it holds for our field. We will not surpass these limits until we have a significantly greater number of transdisciplinary scholars able to undertake advanced scientific research as well as humanistic historical inquiry.

What we have now is a growing community of serious design historians who add depth and value to the field by addressing a far richer range of issues than the questions that sometimes typified design history in the past. Just think of the rich spectrum of writings by Victor Margolin, Elizabeth Guffey, Teal Triggs, Jonathan Woodham, Carma Gorman, David Raizman, Glenn Adamson, Brigitte Borja de Mozota, Danny Huppatz, Matt Soar,Harriet Edquist – every time I remember a name, I think of another. This list is long enough to make my point. One measures the interdisciplinary uses of complexity theory and cliodynamics by the work of the leading scholars in the field. That’s how one measures historians as well.

Those who wish to learn more about cliodynamics should visit three web sites. One is the journal Cliodynamics. While some of the articles in this journal use advanced technical modelling, the writing is crisp and readable. Each issue also contains scholarly articles addressing the broad range of intellectual issues that explain the purposes and problems of the field. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History is available at URL:

http://escholarship.org/uc/irows_cliodynamics

Peter Turchin’s own articles – including his Nature article – are available on the web site of Peter Turchin’s reprints and preprints at URL:

http://cliodynamics.info/Reprints.htm

In adition, Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamica Web Page offers a wide variety of resources and links at URL:

http://cliodynamics.info/index.html

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty ofDesign | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design>

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References

Coon, Carleton. 2012. Processes Too Complicated to Explain. Cliodynamics 3:
3–8.

Gell-Mann, Murray. 2011. Regularities in Human Affairs. Cliodynamics 2:
52–70.

Turchin, Peter. 2003. Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Turchin Peter. 2008. “Arise ‘cliodynamics’.” Nature, 454: 34-35.