Reframing

There is a non-linear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fires. Fifty-year-old trees burn fifty times more intensely than twenty-year-old trees. However, because of the power of influential residents living in the Malibu region, since 1919 the local policy has been one of ‘total fire suppression’. This means

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Brian Goodwin taught me that the most important lesson of complexity science is a shift of intention away from prediction and control to appropriate participation . The mental, emotional and psychological state of an intervener affects the outcome of any systems intervention. If we stop wanting to control change and shift to a responsive dance with... See more

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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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... See more

(6) This worldview of a single reality and a single world is profoundly defuturing, to invoke Australian design theorist Fry’s (1999) concept. To recover the ability to imagine other possible futures requires going beyond the modernist ontology of separation and toward an ontology that acknowledges the interdependence of everything that exists.

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Their definition of a protocol is “an engineered argument.” The protocol itself exists, and it is having some effect on and in the world. A lot of these effects cause what they call “tensions”: A tension is a tradeoff plus a conflict. ... This kind of frame is difficult and frustrating because it means that much of what emerges can’t be controlled... See more

[simplicity/complexity/clarity]

usually the way I say it is Simplicity complexity and then clarity so in other words if we think about just the way things happen you take simple things and simple things over time evolve into complex things and you end up with these arms races that look like they're going to go on forever because what is an end of an... See more

Fire suppression without provisions for the inevitability of California’s fire cycles is, simply put, the pursuit of uniformity with the result of catastrophe. What if we saw fire not as a crisis to be managed, but as an epistemological break – a regular call to rethink our relationship to prediction, adaptation, and climate governance? What if we... See more