emergent order v1

oragnized chaosemergent order

I heard about Elinor Ostrom the first time last year. And a paper by Ron Eglash only a few months ago. There seems to be a thread tying these two together with the works of Jane Jacobs, Arturo Escobar, and Keller Easterling. In most cases, these people were writers and researchers, bringing light to the work of independent communities.

Organized Chaos—or maybe Emergent Order—sounds like a decent tagline at the moment. So, what is it? Best I’ve got is a string of quotes—to be better digested in the future:

Notes

Life and Death of Great American Cities

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served - Jane Jacobs

Hope in Source #11: City as Liturgy

Pickstock : Descartes :: Jane Jacobs : Urban Planners: Replacing a “living, very sophisticated, rich and subtle order” with “visually flashy and comprehensible, but that was outside of time and therefore dead.”

Organic Order is not meant to be known all at once. It runs a system based on its output. Generating a fractal order - Timothy Patitsis

RadicalxChange Replayed #14: No Normal | Keller Easterling in Conversation with Shumi Bose

The parameters of the system are constantly changing and therefore systems don’t hold… Productive entanglements is the phrase that we’ve been throwing around. - Shumi Bose

Design can often be a process for finding and applying some kind of over arching (top-down) order. These suggest a different route; Elinor Ostrom’s research shows communities coordinating to maintain shared resources without a central authority. Ron Eglash documents the fractal patterns in African architecture. ✨Everyone is a designer✨, and not in the IDEO Design Thinking™ way. The only constant is change.

Hugh Dubberly writes about some of the changes through design’s history that made this “problem solving” frame less effective on. He also has a wide range of sources for future rabbitholes :). What does it all mean for someone whose job is supposed to be producing all those “solutions”?

idk

Skimmed / Read

  • *Design for the Pluriverse — Arturo Escobar
  • Life and Death of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs

Want to read:

  • Medium Design - Keller Easterling
  • Order Without Design - Alain Bertaud
  • The Self-Organizing Universe - Eric Jantsch