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Science for Designers: The Meaning of Complexity - Point of View - March 2012
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POINT OF VIEW / MARCH 2012 / SCIENCE FOR DESIGNERS: THE MEANING OF COMPLEXITY
Mar 30, 2012
Point of View
About This Blog
08:00 AM
THE METROPOLIS BLOG
Science for Designers: The Meaning of
Complexity
M icha el M eha ffy a nd Nikos A. Sa linga r os
Examining contemporary life through design,
architecture, interior design, product design,
graphic design, crafts, planning, and
preservation.
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Traditional city fabric evolved over generations as an extension of our own biology, thus representing an application of a
kind of “collective intelligence” due to the system, not of any individual.
Images: Mustapha Ben Hamouche
Today’s designers seem to love using new ideas coming from science. They embrace them as
analogies, metaphors, and in a few cases, tools to generate startling new designs. (Computer
algorithms and spline shapes are a good recent example of the latter.) But metaphors about the
complexity of the city and its adaptive structures are not the same thing as the actual complexity of
Design (332)
Education (56)
Exhibitions (38)
Films (21)
First Person (161)
From the Classroom (13)
the city. The trouble is, this confusion can produce disastrous results. It can even contribute to the
Greenbuild (7)
slow collapse of an entire civilization.
Green Design (32)
We might think that the difference between metaphor and reality is so obvious that it’s hardly worth
mentioning. And yet, such confusion pervades the design world today, and spreads from there into
Icon or Eyesore? (3)
In the News (168)
the general culture. It plays a key role in the delusional expectation that metaphors will create
reality. Psychiatrists speak of this as an actual disorder known as “magical thinking”: if our symbols
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are good enough, then reality will follow.
In the hands of designers, this is very dangerous stuff. We see it at work in the failed iconic
buildings that were sure to create economic development, or urban vitality, or greater quality of life
purely because of a futuristic image. We see it also in the many “tokenistic” sustainability features
(wind turbines, etc.) of other iconic new buildings whose actual performance in post-evaluation
studies is woefully poor.
From the perspective of design methodology, this phenomenon is an interesting and important
design problem in its own right. We recognize it as a fundamental weakness of human thought, and
need to adjust our design methodologies accordingly. In this process, the methodologies and
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insights of a humane science, applied by literate designers, can be invaluable. Distinguishing
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physical from metaphorical complexity clarifies a presently confused and unsustainable situation,
and can help us out of it (the ultimate aim of any science, and any philosophy). The topics of
Digit al Edit ion
urbanism, architecture, product design, environmental design, sustainability, and complexity in
science are all tightly interrelated. Humans “design” with much the same aim toward which nature
sense means more stable, more diverse, and more capable of maintaining an organized state —
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like the health of an organism. We learn from the structures and processes by which nature
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“designs” — both aim to increase the complexity of a system so that it works “better”. “Better” in this
designs, so that we can also create and sustain these more organized states.
Some scientists shy away from the notion that nature “aims” for anything. But this begs the
question: are we not part of nature, and do we not “aim” for something in our own designs, and in
the other parts of our life (e.g. seeking our own health and wellbeing)? Then we must accept “aim”
as a characteristic of at least some part of nature. Otherwise, we severely hobble the usefulness of
the scientific tradition as a relevant tool for designers. (Indeed, we would set ourselves on a very
dangerous philosophical path: in effect, rendering the very idea of intelligence — human or
otherwise — as meaningless!)
Let’s start instead from the premise that we are here, and need to make sense of our own situation
and determine our aims. Then we can begin to ask, given this intentionality, what is the most
intelligent approach we can take? How can we learn from the intelligence — the “intentionality” in
that sense — of natural systems? This is now an urgent question because much of human
production — especially since modern industrialization enabled us to do things with really big
footprints — is intentional in the wrong sense. Instead of building up complex systems that work
better within the natural systems that support them, they acquire a fragile, non-resilient complexity
that works against nature.
In this way, human systems of life, movement, production, and economies depend on ever more
energy consumption just to keep running at the same pace, setting us up for an inevitable
catastrophic scenario. At the same time, the design of our environment seems to be driven not so
much by any intelligent intentionality as by images that are stubbornly, even religiously, adhered to,
even as mounting evidence shows that those typologies are inappropriate for complex adaptive
systems. How can we fix this extremely precarious situation? What’s required is a paradigm shift in
the way we perceive and act upon the systems that make our world function. Those systems are
complex and adaptive — that is, their elements are mutually co-adapting and co-evolving, thereby
forming an exceedingly complex pattern.
Even so, such a pattern can be understood scientifically, and exploited by designers, following a
new understanding of the phenomenon of complexity. This effort is part of the burgeoning, but
historically recent, discipline of “complexity science” — the set of astonishing findings into topics
like fractals, strange attractors, emergence, and algorithmic patterns. What these fields of
investigation all have in common is the curious property of systems when a lot of elements are
interacting. Complex systems take on entirely new characteristics that are very different from those
with only a few elements — and usually impossible to predict. They have properties that are
remarkably similar to living systems (which is no coincidence).
For environmental designers and planners, knowing this phenomenon of “emergence” is the key to
getting things right. Cities, for example, are certainly complex adaptive systems, and so are most
other kinds of human environments. If we are trying to solve the problems of cities, then we need to
know the kind of problem we are dealing with. If we treat this as a search for simplicity, or perhaps,
an artistic challenge of visual design, when it is really a problem of organized complexity obeying its
own rules of evolutionary intelligence, then we are likely to make a mess of things. And yet, that is
exactly what architects and planners have done in the past several decades. Complexity science
was at its dawn when, in the middle 20th Century, the adaptive living fabric of our cities was gutted
and replaced by a much more elementary, mechanical model of design.
The result is a simplistic machine, intentionally far from natural complexity. This drastically reductive
process was draped with more complex poetic analogies, which convinced society to implement
crude models that substituted for a richly complex reality. Since then, the scientific discipline has
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advanced farther than anyone hoped, and has begun to tease out formerly inscrutable secrets of
nature — the marvels of evolution, the behavior of Earth systems, even the workings of genetic
processes. For geographers and planners, the phenomena of cities became more comprehensible
too.
Self-generated city — disrespected by those designers who wish to impose their own will on cities, and by
governments who want total control — yet representing a natural phenomenon as basic as life itself. Dharavi,
India.
Image: YGLvoices
Many designers are still unaware of these developments. For them, design is essentially about
conveying expressive meaning, symbolism, and metaphor. Others pretend to keep up with the
times but don’t bother with generating adaptive structural complexity — they continue to use
fashionable metaphors to build non-adaptive, dysfunctional architectural and urban forms. This is a
distorted artistic heritage of design, not at all about understanding systems and their emergent
properties, which has come to a frontal collision with its scientific heritage. Artists at some point
became specialized cogs in the same commodified industrial machine. Their job was now to sprinkle
“meaning” (metaphor, analogy, expressive character) onto top-down industrial structures, and give
them an acceptable, or better yet marketably desirable, aesthetic character.
Things really took off when this project came to be associated with the allure of fine art. You may
want to protest here, and ask: isn’t it our job to symbolize the scientific spirit of our age, and the
new cosmological view of nature? Yes, but not as a mere sugar coating, a razzle-dazzle product
“theming” — the meaning should be embodied in the objectives we achieve with our designs, and
the way they accommodate and improve human life. The best architecture does not confuse these
two aspects of life and art in a mutually destructive manner, but uses them to serve one another.
When we paste a metaphoric “theme” over the design, after a few years, it begins to look
ridiculous. That’s because the thing on the outside has no inherent relation to the thing on the
inside — it’s little more than a veneer. And it works rather poorly. So the once-futuristic cases for
old personal computers, the expression of another age’s romance with technology, now look
absurd. The futuristic skins of famous art museums and concert halls are already stale and dated,
so that now the only remaining customers for such a style are third-world countries playing catch up
with Western architectural fashions.
If, instead, we let the expression of the object grow from its complex relationship to its environment,
and to the job it has to do for human beings, something remarkable happens: it takes on a kind of
“classic” quality. The design seems almost to have “grown” that way, or to be inevitable — and then
we say: “it’s a classic”. It is timeless. It will be valued by future generations just as we value (or
ought to value) the greatest design achievements of previous generations.
Alas, most design firms today don’t work towards this goal at all. Instead, they seek to attract
attention through novelty and “theming”. They may give lip service to the approaches we discuss
here, but without understanding the deeper methodological change those require. Though they are
experts at glossy marketing in competing for major new projects and the practice of smooth talking
to impress clients, they continue to do business as usual. A good designer is responsible for both
implementation and adaptation. Do not confuse “intentionality” in a system changing itself so as to
adapt — a sign of intelligence — with the intentions of a designer who ignores adaptation.
The latter is a sign of unintelligent action. We see this over and over in products based strictly
upon visual images. Dysfunctional satellite cities and suburbs were built in this manner. Design
“intentionality” increases complexity so as to make the system work in the best way possible, not
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only for its explicit function, but especially as it is embedded both within its context and its
environment. The job weaves together many things — like a city does — thus the design has to
embrace and encourage connectivity within diversity. The chore of design, in such a complex
environment, is not to impose an overly simple order from above, but to help to orchestrate the
diversity, using its own latent dynamics, into a more spontaneous kind of patterned order. When it
succeeds, we recognize it as a beloved city that nourishes us in more ways than one. A model of
organized complexity proposed by one of us in 1997 (and reprinted as Chapter 5 of our book A
Theory of Architecture) finds a striking parallel in the “Integrated Information Model for
Consciousness” later developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Its essence is that complex
systems evolve an integrated connectivity among their components so their information output is
high, yet coherent. This coherence is often mistaken for simplicity, and this is the source of much of
the confusion we address in this essay.
Human life on earth is creating signs of informational intelligence: an earth that is conscious because it is
intimately interconnected. We can save civilization from self-destruction by understanding the underlying
mechanisms. Egypt at night.
Image: NASA
Note that “complexity” is very different from “complicatedness”. Some postmodernist urbanists seem
eager to conflate these two very different ideas. You don’t get a system when you pile up disjointed
fragments, because there is no integration. Instead, a complex system arises through a process
working to organize different and often conflicting elements in some way, in spite of their
differences. Intentionality in building complexity sheds all “complicatedness” that is irrelevant and
unconnected, just like in natural systems. It does not “streamline” processes to a single aim, but
simply evolves the system to include those multiple connected cycles, however large or small, that
interact in some essential way.
That process is often a subtle dynamic, such as a set of apparently simple adaptive rules that each
element follows. Why do people walking through a park all move along one line and not others?
Why does one store get lots of pedestrian customers and another, just as good, fail? We can
discover and document the socio-geometric patterns that people are following, as they make the
simple human calculations that we all do: head in the direction of your destination, avoid
obstructions, stop only if you see something interesting, and so on.
If we understand these patterns, we can place our pavement more effectively, or place our store in
a more successful location. Other patterns of complex organization can be documented and put to
work for us in our designs. The human inhabitants of even the most diverse city are, and remain,
part of a complex emergent whole. Their complex behaviors and interactions must not be reduced
for the city to work like some crude yet giant machine, for that would (and does) severely damage
living systems. So, too, the elements of an ecosystem have a history, as do other natural systems.
This is the nature of complexity — it has an inherent wholeness or whole-systems quality to it.
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The elements we are considering possess what the physicist David Bohm called an “implicate
order” — they have a much deeper relationship within a whole system that predates our
observation. We face a perceptual problem, however. The reason most people think of complexity
as being more like “complicatedness” — a messy collection of unrelated parts — is that we are very
good at seeing particular fragments of the world. This view has its evolutionary benefits — we can
see just a snapshot of what happens at a certain point and at a particular time, and omit all the
interactions that brought those parts together in the first place. While this ability gave early humans
an advantage in quick decision-making, it handicaps us when confronting the complex systems that
we are now capable of building. We tend to forget that this way of looking at the world and its
complex interactions is merely an abstraction, helpful for some purposes, but not for design. This is
because in design, we are working with complex, implicate-ordered systems. Earth and life systems
manifest design intentionality (in the sense of organizing their complexity) and intrinsic intelligence.
When we treat these systems as problems of simplicity, we fail to understand the actual complex
systems that we are creating, disturbing, and often destroying — a neighborhood, a city, an
ecology, a human economy, or a living planet. And so, today, we find ourselves in a great deal of
trouble.
Michael Mehaffy is an urbanist and critical thinker in complexity and the built environment. He is a
practicing planner and builder, and is known for his many projects as well as his writings. He has
been a close associate of the architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Currently he is
a Sir David Anderson Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a Visiting Faculty
Associate at Arizona State University; a Research Associate with the Center for Environmental
Structure, Chris Alexander’s research center founded in 1967; and a strategic consultant on
international projects, currently in Europe, North America and South America.
Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory,
architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of
the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Salingaros published
substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and
Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He still is
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is also on the Architecture
faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.
Note: All photos in this post were replaced with alternates on 4/2/2012.
Read more posts from Michael and Nikos here.
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