When to Design for Emergence

My friend Kasey Klimes wrote a fantastic piece called “

When to Design for Emergence

” on the design dynamics of large-scale software after working on Google Maps.

https://newsletter.rhizomerd.com/p/when-to-design-for-emergence

He points out that our current approach is designed to only solve the most common needs of the most number of users.

Anything b... See more

Design for Emergence is…

* …open-ended and permissionless. Resulting designs are often surprising, something the original designer could have never imagined.

* …context-adabtable. The end-user can integrate their local or contextual knowledge

* …composable. It provides a basic ‘language and grammar’ that’s easy to learn and employ, but can also exte... See more

“In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result.

The main difference between for example user-centered design (“There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software”) is that in design for emergence the user has control. Design is sort of decentralized.

When we innovate only in terms of a solutionist framework, Easterling argues in her book  Medium Design , we optimize for static outcomes wedded to the status quo of product-market fit. Solutions are one-time fixes, usually implemented by someone else, which break as soon as the context they’re responding to changes (which it does, constantly)

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we’re about to see a shift away from this design paradigm to what is known as design for emergence.

So but how do we build software that can be anything without falling into the Zombocom trap? I believe that Bezos interview shows us exactly how.

1. You start from a systems-level insight ( the internet is growing rapidly )


2. Then work backwards to a first best customer who has a burning need ( can’t find book ) that is related to your superpower ( intern

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