by John Thackara
illustration by Cam Chesney

HOW DO YOU DESIGN A WORLD THAT RELIES LESS ON TECHNOLOGY AND MORE ON PEOPLE? THE EDGES MAY HOLD MORE ANSWERS THAN THE CENTER.

In biology they call it “the edge effect”—the tendency for a greater variety and density of organisms to cluster in the boundaries between communities. As in nature, so too in a networked economy: Variety, density, and interaction are the best indicators of success. Unfortunately for those stuck in their cubicles, these success factors don’t naturally occur inside large companies where one is usually too busy worrying about the company’s share price to see developments at the edge.

The edge doesn’t fare much better in the world of industrial research either. Each year, some $160 billion is spent on research and development by companies and governments in industrialised countries, but less than 5 percent ends up as a product or service someone will buy one day.

The reason? Research—like design itself—is too often disengaged from its context. The majority of industrial R&D is driven by a frantic scampering after technological Holy Grails—not by an exploration of changing social needs.

Traditional design thinking focuses on form and structure. Problems are “decomposed” into smaller steps, which are then prioritized in lists. Actions and inputs are described in a blueprint or plan—and then other people implement it. This is a top-down, outside-in approach. It doesn’t work well now because complex systems, especially human-centered ones, won’t sit still while we redesign them.

A sense-and-respond kind of design seems to work better: desired outcomes are described, but not the detailed means to get there. Sense and respond means being responsive to events in a context—such as a city or a marketplace—and being able to respond quickly and appropriately when reality changes. We act in these systems on the basis that they are part of an interacting whole.

This means designing as steering more than shaping. Instead of being authors of a finished work, we need to see ourselves as facilitators whose job is to help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems we live in.

This shift in emphasis from what things look like to how they behave—from designing on the world, to designing in the world—is a big one for design. Peter Bogh Andersen, who designs maritime instrumentation, compares interacting with today’s dynamic environments to navigating a ship. “When I started teaching human-computer interaction in the 1980s,” he recalls, “the ideal was that the user should be in control of the system. The system should not act unless the user asked it to do so. In process control, however, the situation is quite different.

Here, physical processes are running independently of the user, whose task is to control them. The art of navigation is similar: it is to pit controllable forces—rudder, propeller— against uncontrollable ones—the the sea and the wind—to achieve one’s purpose.” Computer games provide another analogy. There is dramatic conflict between the protagonist (the ship’s captain) and the bad guys (the wind and the sea) who are active, unpredictable, and only indirectly controllable. Systems change in ways we don’t need or want.

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