When to Design for Emergence

Common needs represent large markets, but the needs are largely met, and competition between solutions is fierce. Long-tail needs are often unmet and come with much less competition, but individually represent markets too small to justify the expense of development.

Design for emergence is permissionless. It empowers people by way of its constitution even though it can never know what people will do with that power. In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.

Design for emergence prioritizes open-ended combinatorial possibilities such that the design object can be composed and adapted to a wide variety of contextual and idiosyncratic niches by its end-user. LEGO offers an example — a simple set of blocks with a shared protocol for connecting to one another from which a nearly infinite array of forms can... See more

In order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which are (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.

Notion is a philosophical descendent of HyperCard (turns out you can even buy a third-party HyperCard-themed Notion template) that offers extremely adaptable information structures built from an alphabet of ‘content blocks’. It’s also worth $10 billion and has 30 million users. I used it to create the first bidirectionally linked note-taking system... See more

Design for emergence is open-ended. There’s no room for surprise in high modern or user-centered design, unless the design is exapted for an unintended use (see “Design Exaptation” in the bottom right quadrant of the 2x2 above). Meanwhile, a key characteristic of design for emergence is that the end design may be something that the original designe... See more

Today, design for emergence—made profitable by SaaS—supports an enormous market of left-behind long-tail users.

Rather than building a static, purpose-built solution to a single common problem with lots of users (and lots of competitors), they’ve won robust user bases by supporting a broad swath of long-tail user needs.