IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

complex world, ‘‘its ultimate objective and approach have to be discovered,
not specified.’’ 3 Theodor Zeldin, the storyteller and good listener, echoes
Carroll the system designer: Our age, he observes, is one in which ‘‘deliberation
replaces specification.’’ 4 For your deliberation, therefore, I conclude
with observations on seven design frameworks:
m From blueprint and plan to sense and respond
m From high concept to deep context
m From top-down design to seeding edge effects
m From blank sheets of paper to smart recombination
m From science fiction to social fiction
m From designing for people to designing with us
m From design as project to design as service
From Blueprint and Plan to Sense and Respond
Flow 213
Traditional design thinking focuses on form and structure. Problems are
‘‘decomposed’’ into smaller steps, and these are prioritized in lists. Actions
and inputs are described in a blueprint or plan—and other people produce
or implement it. This is a top-down, outside-in approach. It doesn’t work
well now because complex systems, especially human-centered ones, won’t
sit still while we redesign them. A sense-and-respond kind of design seems
to work better: Desired outcomes are described, but not the detailed means
of getting to those outcomes.
Sense and respond means being responsive to events in a context—
such as a city or a marketplace—and being able to respond quickly and
appropriately when reality changes. This approach implies that we develop
an understanding and sensitivity to the morphology of systems, their
dynamics, their ‘‘intelligence’’—how they work and what stimulates
them. This is a challenge to what Brian Arthur, of the Santa Fe Institute,
calls ‘‘the cognitive abilities of people and organizations’’ 5 —their ability to
interpret, to see things differently, and to focus on principles of relationship,
connection, communication, and interaction.
To complicate matters, desired outcomes in service and flow contexts
will themselves not be static. Viewing systems through ‘‘the lens of complexity’’
6 (to borrow a phrase from Canadian educator Alain Findeli) enables
us to reframe the design tasks that confront us. By understanding
why a system is in one state, we can explore the kind of interventions that