How will the latest scientific discoveries inform design practices?

This topic comes in the form of a question. For myself, I have found no answers, but an array of images which inspire me and a set of texts and visions that serve as small leads which I go on chasing. Following this alluring trail, I encountered a handful of valuable books, from which I highlight Banathy’s Designing Social Systems in a Changing World. As I am not done with that one yet, here I refer to another constructive encounter, Margaret J. Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science.

Wheatley, a management and organizational specialist, explores the implications of systems thinking, chaos theory and quantum physics on organizational practices. Her book does not directly refer to design practices as anyone owning a design studio might conceive them, but it has everything to do with them. It talks about creativity and flexibility, finding order in the midst of chaos, and the challenge of designing for a constantly changing scenario. It addresses the need of understanding how the emerging and often complex scientific tenets (at least for lay people as me) can be used to redesign institutions, communities, and the way we are living and working together. The new physics is opening frontiers of knowledge that could be among the most significant of our history.

“There are many places to search for new answers in a time of paradigm shifts“. (p7)

To think design and creativity at large shouldn’t get involved with this strikes me as unreasonable:

All in all, what is the impact of what’s happening in science in our way of producing images, art, and cultural value? How does it affect the way we relate to and integrate in our line of work concepts we work with such as matter, communication, dynamics or energy? How does it affect the way we design products, services, and experiences?

“(…) science has changed. If we are to continue to draw from science to create and manage organizations, to design research, and to formulate ideas about organizational design, planning, economics, human motivation, and change processes (the list can be much longer) then we need to at least ground our work in the science of our times. We need to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what has become known to us during the twentieth century. We need to expand our search for the principle of organization to include what is presently known about how the universe organizes.“

Wheatley starts off from a fairly given premise: due to the great influence of Newtonian science on our way of thinking and perceiving reality, we tend to organize this perceived reality through the analogy of a machine, which can be broken down into parts.

That leads us to the fallacy of believing that if we can break things into parts, and address problems in a reducionist manner, working in each individual component with a separate logic, in separate teams, we can finally assembly the machine back together and it will be working perfectly. The challenge begins, as Margaret Wheatley recurrently reminds us, when people and projects refuse to function that way. Life itself does not work like that.

New discoveries in science tell us that a new view of the world is emerging. They tell us that life and the cosmos are an organic and highly coherent and interconnected system. The analogy of the machine gives place to a view of the world as a living organism. “Its logic is the logic of life itself: evolution towards coherence and wholeness, through interconnection and interaction” (Ervin Laszlo, 2006).

One overwhelming observation made by these new scientists is that, at the particle level, nothing is separate; nothing exists except in relationship to everything else. Whereas Newtonian physics focused on things and matter rather than interconnectedness, in quantum theories, relationship is the key determiner of everything.

Some key ideas any designer might want to follow and might try to integrate into his daily practices after reading this book could be:

• When we study the individual parts or try to understand a system through discrete quantities, we get lost. To understand and work with the system, we need to observe in its wholeness, and this is revealed only as a shape, not facts. Systems reveal themselves as patterns, not as isolated incidents or data points. (see Fritjof Capra, 1999, ch.3)
• Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. The crucial feature of the emerging scientific view is space and time transcending correlation, where information is available non-locally and a temporally. (see the Akashic Field theory by Ervin Laszlo)
• The universe is a participative place: any act of looking for certain information evokes the information we went looking for. This simultaneously eliminates our opportunity to observe other information. Every act of measurement potentially looses more information than it gains. Our old views constrain us. They deprive us from engaging fully with a universe of potentials.
• We have to move beyond the fallacy of control and stop fearing change so much, as individuals, as designers, as team-workers. We have to learn to indulge in the experience of disequilibrium, novelty, loss of control and surprise, as part of the playground of growth and continuous change.
• “The natural dynamics of simple dissipative structures teach the optimistic principle of which we tend to despair in the human world: the more freedom in self-organization, the more order“. (see Erich Jantsch, 1980)
• Take disorder as an opportunity. “The things we fear most in organizations - disruption, confusion, chaos - need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity.”
• There is no objective reality “out there”. The environment we experience is co-createdthrough our acts of observation, what we choose to notice and worry about. We inhabit a world that co-evolves as we interact with it.
• Acting should precede planning. Instead of the ability to analyze and predict, we need to know how to stay acutely aware of what’s happening now, and we need to be better, faster learners from what just happened. Dealing with whatever is.
• “Matter doesn’t matter“, focus on awareness, relationships, communication, the quality of information and connections.

Finally, and because this line of wondering can tend to get to abstract and apart from everyday movement, a personal testimony on how Weathley herself integrated such broad and far-reaching discoveries into her daily practice:

“My growing sensibility of this quantum world has profoundly affected my practice in organizations. Now I struggle to remain aware of the system and give up my well trained abilities to reduce and separate things as the route to understanding. I concentrate much more on processes now, focusing on qualities rather than quantities, paying more attention to things lie pattern, direction, feel, and the internal rhythm of what’s happening. Long ago I gave up looking for straightforward cause and effect. I feel similarly that positioning things as polarities doesn’t help - we need to stop drawing lines of opposition and try to understand the “and” of “one and one”. (p45/46)

Well, if that is not wisdom from which any designer can grow from, I don’t know what is…

As I don’t offer any answers in this post and come forward with too many questions, I will compensate by closing it with a link to a slideshow that presents many concrete proposals on how systemic and complex thinking can be scaled down to practice in a real world project. It is also one I greatly admire...

By Joana Bértholo

Image Credits: http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/%7Eadenau/cs206/