design constraints

“After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared. After that, several species of plants became ‘weeds’ and some of the animals became ‘pests;’ and Adam found that gardening was much harder work. He had to get his bread by the sweat of his brow and he said ‘It's a vengeful God. I should never have eaten that apple.’

- Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 1968

“When we recognize that there is no design in "Nature," this perception will set us free form the old controversy, so that we can go on to recognize that indeed the phenomena called ‘adaptation,’ ‘acclimation,’ ‘addiction,’ and so on are always brought about by the dualism of interactive processes. It takes two or more organisms and an environment, all interacting, to generate and regulate any evolutionary process. And the resulting process may be beneficial (to whom?) or stabilizing or lethal.”

- Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1977

I'm interested in constructing a way of looking at the world that lets us use some of the same indicators for social health as for ecological health. I want that way of looking, as an intervention into the way we think about design. I've written about social health, ecological health, and design elsewhere (though that paper is getting kind of crusty) - for now suffice to say this:

Changing the world is not the problem.
The world is changing right now, faster than ever before.
Don't try and change how the word is - there is no lever big enough.
Change how the world changes.
Design is the systematic practice of change.
Intervene into the way we do design, and you change the way we 
translate our intentions into tools, landscapes, institutions, art, policies, etc.
Change design, and you change change.

Following Bateson implications above (and elsewhere), the dominant mode of design in the world today can be characterized aslinear goal-seeking. Identify a goal, visualize the shortest path to achieve it, break that path into discrete steps, and begin. That’s the exoteric version. There’s also another, hidden, element of linear goal-seeking design: Think of your goal as cut-off from the rest of reality - an island unto itself - and steadfastly maintain that sense of isolation as you pursue it. Keep your eyes fixed firmly on the prize.

After a few thousand years of (some of) humanity getting better and better at this mode of design, the result are in. The consequences for the natural world - as well as for humanity - are disastrous. And the better we get at it, the bigger the disaster is.

Why is this? There are two reasons. 

One: When we constrain nonlinear systems according to the mechanistic pursuit of a single goal, we inevitably impair their ability to self-organize.

The process of linear, goal-seeking design, which shapes so much of the human environment, strips the native complexity from the systems it touches. One need only compare a forest to a farm, or a village commons to a grade school classroom, to see that. We begin with a system whose complexity affords it a great deal of resilience, and by shaping and constraining it according to a narrowly-defined goal - if not replacing it wholesale - we render it fragile, easy to disrupt or shut down.

The presence of a grid pattern in a living system is a sure sign (though not the only one) that the system is being reorganized for extraction, and that it's ability to self-organize is being impaired. 

Two: Our goal is not isolated. We, and the system we are designing, are both coupled to a larger system that is, by definition, infinitely more complex. So when we practice linear design, we create a complexity gradient between the comparatively crude and fragile system we create, and the greater social and ecological systems it is coupled to. This complexity gradient is, in effect, an adaptive pathway for unpredictable complexity to reinvade the impoverished system. 

That patch of the world on which we impress our design - a landscape, a community, an individual - is no longer performing the balancing and regulation functions that are part of its adaptive history. Instead, it is doing one thing very well - pursuing our goal - while achieving a set of unexamined and accidental consequences. That addition and subtraction of functions pushes the myriad systems (with which our patch of the world is coupled) out of whatever basins of stability they had occupied. Social and ecological systems become unstable.

As changes cascade through coupled systems, the adaptive intelligence of the whole “attempts” to re-establish its developmental trajectory, in ways that are utterly unpredictable in detail, and (by now) totally predictable in pattern. We see this as “invasion” of new organisms, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide-resistant weeds, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And we see it as school shootings, global military conflict, and xenophobic suspicion and violence. All of these can be viewed as systems that have been thrown off a metastable developmental trajectory, and into a zone of chaotic oscillation between potential adaptive strategies. 

When our systems prove fragile and clumsy, we use linear design to compensate with more of the same. We create checks, buffers, balances, and compensators, that of necessity are created out of the same process that produced the problem. Our human environment becomes more and more a house of cards, a sprawling, interlinked set of systems that are each designed to achieve one goal, by the shortest path possible. We build more and more complex, more and more fragile systems, out of our own linear goal-seeking subsystems, while stripping complexity, resilience, and self-organization from the living world around us. 

It begins to appear that the massive increases in social complexity in the past 5000 years might be a less than zero sum game. For every new differentiation, for every new alternative, created in human society, our world as a whole has lost complexity. Following Bateson, the light of the Mind that is immanent in the global biosphere is dimming, becoming obscured, even as a few flares illuminate the shadow-shrouded landscape of human society.

Enter ecological design.

The precepts of ecological design (as expressed in From Eco-Cities..., but others could do just as well) turn the worldview of linear goal-oriented design on it’s head. They are a system of pointers, that serve to direct our attention to crucial intersections - the coupling of our design with the larger world, the internal coupling of the subsystems within our design, and even to that crucial connection between our own mental system and a larger immanent Mind. 

In contrast to linear goal-oriented design, ecological design demands nonlinearity. While it retains the sense of a design goal, that goal is understood as radically connected with the matrix of the living world, rather than simple and unitary. 

The design schematic becomes: 

• Identify a problem. • Examine the network of causality and information that surround that problem. • Envision an assemblage of biological systems that, in their functioning as a whole, transform the circumstances of the problem • Examine the network of causality and information that will attend this transformation. •  Allow this vision of consequences to affect the design.  • Assemble these biological wholes, and give them the conditions necessary for self-organization. • Observe, gather data, assimilate, and repeat.

The precepts, taken as a whole, produce a single imperative that counters the trajectory  that linear, goal-oriented design propels us along. 

That imperative is:

Conserve complexity.

By addressing human needs with ecological design methodologies - by bringing together familiar and novel assemblages of organisms, and fostering their self-organization - we get out of the trap of trading in smart complexity for dumb. Instead of creating fragile systems at the expense of resilient ones, we bring long-term evolutionary intelligence into our designed systems, to create a more vigorous, adaptive, coevolutionary process. 

“Conserve,” in this context, carries both its meaning “to preserve” and its meaning “to limit.” Following the pattern of intelligence - of immanent Mind, in Bateson's term - that marks evolutionary processes in the biosphere, we set our sights on maximizingstable gains in complexity. That requires an enlightened “net accounting” - for any gains that require gross losses elsewhere in the system will not be stable. If it turns out that all our fancy and interconnected information technology in some way actuallyrequires the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, then the gross gains in complexity won’t really be gains at all. Nor will they be stable - from the perspective of immanent, evolutionary intelligence, they will be a flash in the pan - evanescent complexity, rather than resilient.

Each of Todd’s precepts points down a pathway of building evolutionary intelligence into the meeting of human needs. This is the only pathway that promises a bright future for humankind. Only by creating space within human settlement for the flourishing of evolutionary intelligence (much older than humankind) can we hope to achieve a sustainable global culture. Only by conserving the resilient complexity of the natural world, and weaving it more throughly through the fabric of our lives, cultures, and built environments, can our civilization survive the coming years - at least, in a form worth having. We have an opportunity, by limiting the fragility of our infrastructure, and social systems, to stop trading in smart complexity for dumb, and create a civilization worth the effort of sustaining.  

The fact is, there is no reason why we cannot make a world in which each exchange with another living system - individual, ecosystem, or community - fosters the health and self-organization of that system, even as it fosters our own. It’s a worthwhile goal, and might be the only pathway that will get us through these times. Our most formidable task is simply countering the worldview of linear, goal-oriented design. This is our Great Work. We don't even need to know where we are going - only that we are avoiding what definitely doesn't work. We have a lot going for us - deflecting a dynamic system toward something new, away from failing strategies, is also how natural selection does its design work. We can bring that evolutionary intelligence into our design process, and in doing so, conserve the vibrant, functional, living complexity of the human and natural systems we live in. We don't need to set a world into motion - thank goodness - we only need to inflect it's course.