Design as Participation

The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping

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We can build software to eat the world, or software to feed it. And if we are going to feed it, it will require a different approach to design, one which optimizes for a different type of growth, and one that draws upon—and rewards—the humility of the designers who participate within it.

There will always be designers to design the Hummers and the bumper stickers, and there will always be designers to make websites to propagate the warnings and promises of David Foster Wallace. But a new generation of designers has emerged, concerned with designing strategies to subvert this “natural default-setting” in which each person understand... See more