Meadows’ Leverage Points in Complex Systems
“[L]everage points” […] are places within a complex system […] where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.’ (Meadows, 1999:1)
STOCK-AND-FLOW STRUCTURE
Simple systemic flows connected together create complex systems. Flows consist of stocks moving according to set parameters, constants, and numbers. According to Donella Meadows, a system has a stock-and-flow structure. Its stock represents its state, and its flow represents the inflow and outflow that reflect changes in the system’s stock volume. This flow has temporality and depends on the parameters existing in the system. Parameters indicate the rate at which flows increase (inflow) and decrease (outflow) the system’s stock volume. A system may be stable, slow or rapid (imbalanced). Because this stock-and-flow structure entails that the stock volume and stability depends on the rate of the flows (in and out), a system’s stability requires the leveraging of a stock’s buffer capacity so that, if slow, the buffer decreases, and if rapid, the buffer increases. Decreasing or increasing the size of buffer capacity in a system stabilizes and leverages its stock.
The leverage point is in proper design in the first place. After the structure is built, the leverage is in understanding its limitations […] and refraining from fluctuations or expansions that strain its capacity.” (Meadows, 1999:8)
Oscillations in a system result in delays in feedback loops. Short or long delays account for imbalances in a system, describe the rate of changes in the state of the system, and determine the efficiency of its feedback loops. Meadows calls short feedback loops “overreaction” –oscillations that are too short, rapid, and amplified. When speed of changes and size of delays don’t coincide, one sees imbalances in the system.
DRIVING POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOPS
Long feedback loops, those that create slowness in the system’s responses to action, cause chaos, collapse, and irreversible damage. However, most important to a system’s stability is its growth rate. Changing delays in a system can have drastic implications on the stability of the system –its inflow and outflow dilemma. Complex systems contain negative feedback loops that are responsible for regulating these changes (oscillations).
A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the system state that the feedback loop is trying to control. […] The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct.” (Meadows, 1999:8-10)
Chaos takes place when strong positive loops take over weak negative loops resulting in an unstable system with unpredictable growing rates –a behavior which may cause the system to destroy itself. “Control must involve slowing down the positive feedbacks.” (Meadows, 1999:12) Control, then, involves delaying the positive loops to allow the negative feedback the necessary interval to react and regulate the system.
On the one hand, positive feedback loops in a system are self-reinforcing. With high positive feedback, a system may destroy itself by self-multiplying and causing itself to collapse. On the other hand, negative feedback loops are leverage points in a system where intervention can be fruitful. Adjusting the buffer capacity (delays) and thereby recalibrating stock flows (“emergency response mechanisms”) help the system sustain itself by self-correcting in response to changes and oscillations in feedback loops. Because the strength of impacts and feedback must coincide, when one strengthens a system’s negative feedback, one raises its self-correcting abilities.
Negative feedback loops become regulating sources for reducing and slowing the growth of positive loops by giving it time and delays to recalibrate and stabilize itself.
COMPELLING FEEDBACK
In some cases there may be missing feedback in a system which causes it to malfunction. These instances indicate leverage point opportunities to create a “new loop” in a system (Meadows, 1999:13). Making information salient creates awareness and a bifurcation in one’s relationship to the environment, objects, and/or one’s beliefs, in turn redirecting one’s behavior towards and perception of a system. Turning no feedback into persuasive feedback generates a new systemic loop. However, persuasiveness occurs when information is configured in a meaningful and compelling way (i.e. comparative juxtaposition of selected data reveals another layer of understanding –new loop). New loops generate mass behavioral shifts as they raise the notion of accountability for individual actions and decisions –a paradigm shifter.
SELF-ORGANIZING POWER
[R]ules for self-organization […] govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions.” (Meadows, 1999:15)
Self-organizing structures allow a system to change, evolve, and sustain itself as external actors and internal entities affect and impact its systemic structure overtime; thus, developing new response mechanism and enacting new rules and behaviors. Self-organizing rules dictate the emergence of complex adaptive structures and behavioral patterns in a system. These rules help the system deal with unpredictable behavior of external and internal actors, leaving the system open to changing conditions, and variable and open-ended in itself to evolve, adapt, and mutate over time.
TRANSCENDING PARADIGMS
Donella Meadows suggests that transcending paradigms lies in one’s ability and willingness to perceive multiple mindsets where no paradigm is true or right. With this enlightened view, flexible and open-ended paradigms evolve in relation to a system’s variable purpose, goal, or belief.
Source: Meadows, Donella H. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Sustainability Institute, December, 1999.
Ethnography in Design Practice
Ethnographic research is important when interaction designers start raising questions about the core values and place that technological tools have in people’s everyday practices. The methods used for understanding user behavioral patterns and cultural realities focus on interaction as inseparable from the environment in which it occurs. Rather than analyzing separate data points, ethnography restores actions within their contextual settings and examines behavior as part of a holistic system in which people, things, and the environment affect each other and intertwine with one another.
Ethnography in UCD
Ethnography can take multiple forms including: participant observation, contextual interviewing, and participant self-documentation; which touch upon the contextual, emotional, and behavioral layers of user-specific practices. (Payne, 2011) Through data collection and analysis, designers are better equipped at identifying leverage points wherein remodeled or novel products or services can have an effective place in users’ everyday lives.
On November 12, 2011, in an IxDA NYC workshop entitled “Ethnography and User Experience”, presenter John Payne, Experience Designer and co-founder at Moment Design, discussed how the application of ethnographic methodologies within design practices effectively uncovers user behavior and belief in situ, in turn influencing and reshaping a designer’s vision and intent. To demonstrate this research approach to design practice, the workshop included a 1 hour fieldwork in the, then, hype of Occupy Wall Street, for which the attendees were split into teams of 5. Each team listed their assumptions about the living conditions as well as the beliefs and goals of the OWS movement. Teams then collectively formulated questions that needed answers before arriving at the site. With 4 research methods laid out by Payne for the exercise – observe physical/digital traces, collect a cultural inventory, observe environmental behavior, and conduct semi-structured interviews – team members assumed the roles of facilitator, photographer/videographer, note-taker, and scout.
The results of the fieldwork proved to be successful in inspiring the attendees as they discovered how their assumptions about their hypothetical “users” – the OWS people– were either conflicting with and/or limited to what they had over/heard and read elsewhere. This exercise required that participants collaborate and set aside their traditional and comforting research practices. Each team presented their findings through storytelling and highlighted specific challenge/opportunity spaces wherein design can have an effective impact. They proved with the inevitably qualitative data that emerged from their observations and encounters that users are heterogeneous and carry varied perceptions, goals, and behaviors. Rather than generalizing users based on assumptions, ethnographic research helps understand heterogeneity and the patterns of behavior that links a people together. This new collective knowledge offers designers the potential to create hospitable and adequate experiences for users.
Digital Ethnography
To prove this approach applicable to everyday design practice, Payne ended the workshop with an introduction to digital ethnography, also known as Digital Ethno (Masten, 2003:76), which consists of traditional ethnographic processes enhanced by participant engagement through the use of digital products and services already preexisting in their daily lives (Rhea, 2006:19). This method invites participants to contribute to research which helps researchers transcend a priori knowledge they might have had about users by highlighting digitally recorded instances of user/consumer behavior in situ and over time (Rhea, 2006:21). Through the use of both traditional and digital ethnographic methods, research teams can access intimate aspects of people’s lives in ways that traditional methods alone can not.
While traditional ethnography entails observation and analysis, digital ethnography enables researchers to capture real-time situated data. While traditional ethnography is the immersive practice which once belonged solely to the realm of sociological research, ethnographic practices in a wider sense have become part of designers and marketers’ vocabulary and processes for identifying context-sensitive user patterns of behavior. This merging of practices (ethnographic research with design) has proven to be a rich source for innovation and empathic design.
Digital ethnography enables designers to identify gaps in users’ lives for which innovation can be fruitful, and opportunities wherein design can make an appropriate and effective impact. This method engages and encourages participants to contribute to the research at hand, making them co-authors of the creative process. The practice exploits the wireless network as an opportunistic space for documenting cultural patterns of behavior over time (Masten, 2003:77).
With the use of digital ethnography, accounts are externalized events in users’ lives that help explain and analyze reflexively the social nature of contextual behaviors and patterns; those in turn indicate possible opportunities for innovation that either complements, transforms, or enhances users’ relationships to their environments, to contextual events, and/or to objects. Ethnographic practices add value to the design process and incentive, and to the products and services which emanate from the understanding of user behavioral needs.
Cultural Probes
Cultural Probes (Gaver, 1999) are tools concerned with gathering evocative responses from participants in order to understand people in new ways and to reach their intimate behaviors and idiosyncratic thoughts.
Probes are both tools for research and vehicles for collecting data about the local culture of a given user group, that engage participants in self-documenting their everyday. Probes are positioned as essential ingredients to experimental design processes that are responsive and centered around the cultural understanding of participants. Examples of probes take the form of picture taking, self-mapping, postcard questionnaires, digital memo-taking, etc. making “the strange familiar and the familiar strange” (Gaver, 2004).
As probes collectively reflect informal and intimate data about users, they provide an understanding of the local culture and an insight into what sort of design interventions can add pleasure to users’ lives. The probes focus on the implication of innovation within local cultural settings and the experiential ideas that may emerge within this new knowledge-base.
The probes are aimed at driving new understandings of technology through speculative design. Speculative design extends the notion of design practices to include questions concerning the function of designed objects, the experiences that they provide, and the cultural context in which they occur. Probes are particularly interesting in data as inspirational. Varied facets of culture serve as inspirations for the design of new kinds of pleasures embodied within ambiguous, unfamiliar, and playful objects and experiences.
With challenging users through probing, designers can identify new opportunities wherein speculative design can enact a new understanding of everyday life through interacting with pleasurable technologies.
A final note
Design Anthropologist Chritina Wasson, in 2000 explains how ethnographic research in user-centered design is employed to better understand ‘how users do things and use products’ and what role technology serves in users’ work, play, or educational practices (2000:380-1). Ethnography made as part of the design process reveals what Wasson calls “a new dimension of the user.” This dimension recalibrates designers’ preconceptions about a given user group by guiding the design process and informing the emergence of intuitive ideas for UCD solutions and experiences.
source:
Gaver, W., Dunne, T., and Pacenti, E. (1999). “Cultural Probes.” Interactions, January/ February, pp. 21-29.
Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., and Walker, B. (2004). “Cultural Probes and the value of uncertainty.” Interactions, Volume XI.5, pp. 53-56.
Masten, D., Plowman, T. (2003). “Digital ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience.” Design Management Journal, Vol. 14, No.2
Payne, John (2011). “Ethnography and User Experience.” IxDA NYC.
Rhea, D., and Leckie, L. (2006). “Digital Ethnography: Sparking Brilliant Innovation.” Innovation Summer 2006, pp. 19-21.
Wasson, Christina (2000). “Ethnography in the Field of Design.” Human Organizations, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 377-388.
The decentralized mindset
Decentralized Computing emerges from the understanding of self-organizing systems in nature. This model, by its implicit plurality and distributed scope, makes use of the behavioral patterns and systemic structures of micro-world organisms to facilitate communication between objects (hardware) and non-objects (software). It allows individual devices to communicate as a unified whole. For Mitchel Resnick (1994) decentralization is crucial to redrafting our images of ourselves and the larger social and environmental system we live in. The decentralized mindset allows our thinking to expand beyond sequential causality and to begin grasping the integral cybernetic layering of our worlds.
When people observe patterns and structures in the world […], they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns and structures in the world […], they often impose centralized control where none is needed.” (Resnick, 1994:120)
Unlike the centralized mindset, digitally constituted worlds are comprised of aggregate objects that share a collective behavior while individually navigating space (peer-to-peer), such as leaderless birds will flock and ant colonies will self-organize by means of pheromone transfer. According to Resnick, self-organizing systems (Resnick, 1994:14) emerge from decentralized settings wherein orderly patterns are the result of lower-level randomness (or local interactions) of individual objects and those in their contextual vicinity. The non-prescriptive or non-deterministic nature of systems accounts for the unpredictability of its micro behaviors and the larger forming structure of its collective behavior over time.
Resnick begun his investigation of the dominant centralized mindset in 1982 by questioning: “How can a mind function so effectively and creatively without anyone (or anything) in charge?” (Resnick, 1994) This led him to explore the mysterious beauty of self-organizing and emergent collective organisms and systems in the world; what he has called “massively parallel microworlds”. His research incited people into new ways of thinking of structures and patterns through experiencing the world under a very different lens. His approach took the form of digitally simulated worlds (a series of StarLogo projects) in which objects collectively self-organize by following decentralized rulesets. These use dedicated programming software and behavioral algorithms to generate virtual social objects, neighborhoods, cities, and worlds. In these micro-worlds, no one object is neither a leader nor a maker nor a seed of complex phenomena that form in their collective worlds; and the environment in which objects interact is not a passive entity, but rather is itself an actor affecting the larger structure or system.
It is more intriguing if a complex, orderly pattern arises from interactions among simple, homogeneous objects than if the same pattern arose from interactions among complex, heterogenous objects.” (Resnick, 1994:121)
Clustered interactions emerge from computationally replicating micro-world networks so as to reveal and exploit the range of possibilities present in the complex nature of our social and environmental conditioning. Simulated worlds (real or imaginary) help us rethink our collectively created social worlds and the significance of our individual actions as potentially seedless and non-causal manifestations; that is, as a decentralized system wherein individual behavior relies very much upon local interactions to produce large-scale patterns. Those patterns represent the non-causality of the emergence of self-organizing wholes which continuously fluctuate, evolve, and reorganize.
Source: Resnick, Mitchel. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. The MIT Press, USA: 1997.
Information Interaction Design – Shedroff, 1999
Data management involves the classification, storability, retrievability, share-ability, and the generation of information across multiple platforms (print, web, mobile, etc.) that represent the gist or essence of “valuable, compelling, and empowering” physical and/or digital user experiences.
In 1999, Nathan Shedroff asked: “How do we as designers create meaningful experiences and interactions for others?” (Shedroff; 1999:288). He introduced the importance of Information Interaction Design as the design of information for contextual user-centric interaction. According to Shedroff, emerging trends in information processing of designed products and experiences include: “information overload, information anxiety, media literacy, media immersion, and technological overload.” (Shedroff; 1999:267) Those, in turn, define the focus of HCI and the practice of Information Interaction Design.
[W]hat most of us deal with everyday […] is not information. It is merely data.” (Shedroff; 1999:270)
The design of data must address the in-forming condition of information; that is, how it communicates in its form by turning data into meaningful and useful content with a servicing intent and contextually thoughtful point of view.
Shedroff maps 3 disciplines as comprised in the practice of Information Interaction Design: “information design, interaction design, and sensorial design.” (Shedroff; 1999:268) Information design makes information valuable and interaction meaningful by way of organizing and framing data for its appropriate audience. Interaction design represents storytelling through interactional platforms (performance, print, digital, etc.) that identify with target user requirements. Finally, sensorial design addresses the psychographic and cognitive needs of users by understanding how design affects the senses (vision, touch, smell, sound) and how it might enrich emotional aspects of user experiences. Information Interaction design, then, seeks to provide efficient and memorable experiences for users within the boundaries of information design, interaction design, and sensorial design according to predetermined or emerging user requirements (needs, abilities, desires, and expectations).
Because the design of data informs the creation of participatory, integrated, and resourceful experiences, Information Interaction Design provides active experiences of knowledge that are interactive, persuasive, efficient, and effective. Shedroff describes wisdom as a “metalanguage”; which is to say that wisdom is an exploration of knowledge and a continuous synthesis of acquired, preconceived and experiential knowledge. The knowledge of knowing reaffirms itself in one’s ongoing rewiring of his/her thought patterns in light of newly established perceptual understandings. Design of data encourages the discovery of new knowledge through meaningful patterns and experiences.
Wisdom is a kind of metaknowledge, a blending of all the processes and relationships understood through experience.” (Shedroff; 1999:273)
Successful interactive systems are first and foremost designed to allow users to discover and learn from information, as well as to interact and control data outcomes through visual feedback. Those systems may be described as engineered to adapt, evolve, and self-sustain overtime as they enable users to populate content and provides them with the virtual freedom to co-create. In a sense, users become producers of their own interactive experiences.
Some important points to consider when designing data-driven interactive experiences:
1) How design organizes and packages information to its audience determines how information is expressed and perceived and what types of values one might assign to the overall patterns or messages.
2) Metaphoric interpretations and explanations of data may render data inaccurate in its appeal to cognitive and structural understanding of its audience.
3) Interaction design helps transform data into an interactive storytelling.
4) Systems can be tailored to allow user input and provide partial user-control.
source:
Shedroff, Nathan. “Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design” Information Design. Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999, pp. 267-292
Designing for Perceptual Differentiation
[T]here are unique features of individual perception that have important implications for the design of information. […] designers must search for some areas of commonality.” (Whitehouse, 1999:103)
Oliver Sacks’ accounts of visually impaired patients demonstrate the nature of perceptual experience as essentially idiosyncratic. This “perceptual fingerprint” is identified as the difference between seeing and understanding, between vision and cognition. Roger Whitehouse categorizes perceptual processes as follows: sensory mechanisms which are defined by individual sensory receptive capabilities (i.e., retinal and eardrum functions); cognitive processing of sensory inputs which depends on individual neural wiring; and ascribed meaning to perceived sensory inputs which results from individual experience and cultural background.
As babies, we leave a womb where we receive little sensory stimulation and, with all our sensory input devices in full working order, emerge into an explosion of light, color, sound, smell, noise, movement, touch–sensations that have absolutely no meaning for us.” (Whitehouse, 1999:108)
Because we possess the ability to adapt and change in accordance to changed environments, we are in a position to perfect our physical and mental competencies. This is due in part to the fact that behavioral interventions are also metaphysical; they affect specific areas of the brain and produce physical changes. In fact, the neuroscientist Micheal Merzenich (2004) described the brain’s evolution as twofold: in childhood, the brain learns to adapt to its environment as it absorbs information directly. He calls this the ‘critical period.’ In the second period, the ‘adult plasticity,’ the brain is able not only to adapt, but also to control its behavior and change at will. The brain is then a volitional entity. By presenting the areas of the brain in the form of a geographical map, he demonstrated how the brain remodels itself in ways that are skill-specific (such as posture, movement, etc.). This also confirms Sacks’ (2009) hypothesis that there may be specific fractions in the brain responsible for specific sensorial activities such as pattern recognition. Sacks’ findings showed that patients under certain medical conditions had experienced geometrical, musical, mobile and psychotic hallucinations involving all their senses in coherent ways. Hence, every brain has its idiosyncratic geography. Merzenich noted that “the embodiment of You” is the greatest determinant of how one’s brain might look. Physical change that occurs in your performance with the world, then, occurs as well in the physical configuration and remodeling of your brain structure.
The contextual scale of information matters; that is, to design at the human scale with considerations for accessibility, readability, and reachability, that correspond to user-centric demographic and psychographic requirements. To design for user-centric perceptual processing is to coherently integrate a belief system. Whitehouse explains how belief may contribute to the ways in which information is assimilated and interpreted, thus affecting the understanding of what one sees.
Shifts in perception are borne out of our ability to adapt, learn, and change unique perceptual beliefs. Change abounds when new skills are achieved and hidden skills are discovered in the course of adapting to contextual circumstances whereby newly-made associations and patterns are established in the mental realm and henceforth shed light onto and transform every preconception and belief one might have had –often referred to as “paradigm shifts”: when one’s whole world is reconsidered and tailored again to fit a new reality. To understand and respond to users’ unique perceptual belief, design needs to shift priorities to meet user-centric design goals that allow for the generation of friction-free solutions that facilitate behavioral, sensorial, and cognitive information consumption.
To achieve effectiveness and efficiency, the design process involves: preliminary user research and observation, defining the problem that requires a design intervention, providing multiple solutions or proposals that address the problem in question, usability testing protocols (determining number of participants, duration of test, types of tests, collect responses, debriefing with users), redesigning according to test results or user responses, etc. Designing for usability methodologies lead to a comprehensive, effective and efficient design solution that responds to users’ perceptual processing needs and expectations.
By simple testing and observation, […] we became aware of some of the practical implications of individual perceptual differences. Most importantly, we began to understand how easy it is to disenfranchise individuals simply by not perceiving and correctly interpreting the most basic facts about their needs.” (Whitehouse, 1999:128)
Whitehouse encourages designers to actively include user cognitive differences by engaging in “the extraordinary value of” user research and usability testing to understanding users’ needs as well as cognitive and cultural requirements.
source:
Merzenich, Micheal. “Exploring the Rewiring of the Brain.” Filmed February 2004.
Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html
(Access Date: December 3, 2009)
Sacks, Oliver. “Hallucinations.” The Robert B. Silvers Lecture, The New York Public Library.
Date: September 21, 2009. Source: http://www.nypl.org (Access Date: December 3, 2009)
Whitehouse, Roger. “The Uniqueness of Individual Perception” Information Design. Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999, pp. 103-129
The Theories of Christopher Alexander
In 1977, architect and researcher, Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language: a guide to designing environments to enable the creation of a collectively made and more living structure or environment. Comprised of rules and guidelines that have resulted from extensive research, observation, and testing of patterns in towns, buildings, and construction, A Pattern Language addresses the unsustainable built environment we live in and encourages a bottom-up approach to architecture wherein a nurturing environment can emerge through the common understanding of patterns and the development of pattern languages (“a genetic code” to best describe their core structural properties or requirements that make the world more livable). Observation of built environments helps identify patterns that have particular impacts on the wellbeing of people. Pattern languages are, then, aggregate elements (or parts) of given systems that enable the generation of convivial physical structures that respond to humane values and a systemic conception of the global (whole) structural scale of spaces and places. The language is developed as a tool for generating coherent and whole environments (buildings, rooms, streets, parks, etc.): “more living structures.”
Not only has it made a huge impact on the ways in which architects and novel practitioners approach architecture and their environments as wholes, but it has also caused the emergent appropriation of its patterns in the world of computer science in general and software programming in particular.
In a 1996 presentation at the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications, in San Jose, California, Alexander reflected on the use of his ideas in the software community that transformed object-oriented computing and how the pattern discipline brought back the systems thinking and humane perspective into the design and architecture of software.
It is Alexander’s understanding that patterns are used as “vehicles of communication” in computer science for discussing, sharing, and modifying data structures, but they are not, however, used as he originally conceived of them. For him, the uses of patterns in software science differ from those in architecture (in the 1970s) whose patterns have a moral quest, a coherent evolution, and aims at a generative whole. The architectural goal is to build a good environment and an objective and living structure “to make human life better.”
Will it actually make life better as a result of its injection into a software system?” (Alexander, 1996)
It seems, to me, that A Pattern Language helps inform the design of self-generating and adaptive computer programs. The most striking correlation between Alexander’s pattern languages and computer science is the works in what computer science often refers to as decentralized or complex adaptive systems, and its parallels to what Alexander describes as “centers” when he talks of “shared pattern languages which [enable people] to generate a complete living structure.”
If we look at systems behavior and the similarities and particularities found within decentralized systems, we see how the conception of an environment built around rules or patterns might generate parallel effects wherein environments are created at the human scale and with the equal consideration of functional and experiential coherence, while yet remaining distinct and separate entities in their particularities.
Alexander’s A Pattern Language promotes a bottom-up approach, which places users of buildings as builders of their environments through the process of co-creating a common ground with the collective consensus of a “shared pattern language”; to give users better control over the spaces they dwell in.
Prior to The Nature of Order (2003-2004), Alexander presented some ideas explored in the extension of his work on patterns: such as, to distinguish between living and non-living structures and to include both technical and experiential fluidity; that is, the integration of both functional and interactive/human behavioral relationships (hardware and software). He defined fifteen geometric properties as essential nodes to architecture that would respond to what he posited as “Do I feel myself to be more whole?” –a certain quest for self-actualization through the generative creation of livable structures. Those recursive geometric properties revealed in the emergence of buildings include the boundaries and gray areas around them as parts of the pattern language itself.
Alexander uses the term “wholeness” to mean: entities of the environment borne out of interactions existing amongst parts (or what he calls centers). He describes “wholeness” as a “field-like” center within which other centers would be interlaced or interdependent, and those in turn would hold centers within centers and so on and so forth –as closely related to self-similarity in chaos theory (Mandelbrot’s study of fractal geometry in nature) and in the behavior of natural systems in the science of fields (e.g., flock of birds). Each center represents a pattern, in theory because it has reoccurred at different times and locations and at most of those has been successful at making one feel more whole.
Essentially, Alexander attempts to identify hubs around which systems occur in the most living structures of which he extracts a pattern language (or a geometric lexicon) for architects and lay people to rely on.
According to a 2002 review in the Harvard Design Magazine, A Pattern Language seems to impose rules that are conceptually important and useful to consider as drivers of a well-informed practice, but which when combined (all 253 rules) create a chaotic and hard-to-conceive structure. In those terms, a bottom-up approach conflicts with the extensive rule set provided by Alexander’s patterns. William Saunders interprets A Pattern Language as “utopist,” “dreamy,” “fragmentary,” “additive,” “structuralist,” “authoritarian,” and even “tyrannical,” despite his respect for the “lively […] and informed intuitions” introduced in the book.
Alexander’s best ideas about town making […]: the promotion of mixed use, pedestrian convenience and zones, ample public transportation, non-exclusive zoning, cluster development, workplaces near and in homes, limited automobile access, small architectural scale, “activity nodes,” town greens, small public squares, street cafes, and so on.’ (Saunders, 2002)
source:
Alexander, Christopher. (1996) “The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, and the Generation of a Living World.” www.patternlanguage.com (last visited: Feb.21, 2011)
Saunders, William S. (2002) “Book Reviews: A Pattern Language.” Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 2002, Number 16. http//ebookbrowse.com (last visited: Feb.18, 2011)
Foundations of ‘Information Design’
Some of the key principles that comprise information design are: the effective and persuasive communication of information, the appropriate delivery of Information as action enabler, the consideration of information as primarily context-dependent, the understanding of user cognitive processing, the practice of visual thinking and structure writing (or information mapping), and the development and the use of a comprehensive universal (e.g. iconic) visual language.
According to Robert Jacobson and Robert Horn, information design describes the emergence of a new visual language borne out of the necessity of understanding, managing, and communicating complexity. Fields stemming from the practice of information design include: “human factors in technology, educational psychology, computer interface design, performance technology, documentation design, typography research, advertising, communications, and structured writing.” (Horn; Jacobson, 1999:22) Information design is not a unified field and is termed differently in by its variety of practitioners. Tensions do exist amongst the multitude of expert fields; namely, between graphic design and technical communication, as well as between experts and novel practitioners. (Horn; Jacobson, 1999:24)
Because information design is not a unified field and because its practice is highly context dependent, it has long been a challenge for designers and researchers alike to develop a vocabulary to describe and pass over the essential ingredients necessary for effectively communicating meaningful and persuasive information.
When design is dependent on context, context is embedded in and transforms the variables within the practice information design. Attempts to create a universal language (e.g. iconic signage) have at times worked against other designers and researchers who have strived to revive and reclaim cultural and natural identity by using local and iconic visual representations. Horn introduced the term VLicons(™) which he coined to distinguish ‘visual language icons’ from words and language alone. VLicons juxtaposes both word and icon to provide a captivating, persuasive and memorable language that extracts the essence while yet communicating a meaningful visual experience. (Horn; Jacobson, 1999:24)
Research design, experience design, and cognitive science are the pillars of information design. This requires that designers of information combine various skill sets in order to provide meaningful interactions for consumers of information. Horn splits information design practitioners as such: inventors, analysts, universalists, collectors, writers, aestheticians, popularizers, and researchers. Jacobson, however, describes how information design can help one read, process, and transfer meaning. (Jacobson, 1999:10)
source: Jacobson, Robert (Ed.). Information Design. MIT Press, Massachussets: 1999
