Designing Complex Systems

Karen Cham

Digital Transformation Design Consultant

Rhizometric Design Ltd www.rhizometricdesign.com

Professor of Digital Transformation Design

Academic Lead, Digital Catapult Centre Brighton

Academic Lead, Connected Futures

University of Brighton

Digital Transformation Design

DTD is a digital first, design lead, user centredindustrial method for engineering transformation of complex human centred systems e.g.

• multi-platform global marketing campaigns• large organizational infrastructures• multiplatform markets & distibuted economies• virtual worlds & simulations

Gen X Digital Grandma

• 1994 Website

• 1994 Touchscreen

• 1996 Microbusiness Model

• 1996 Live Locative Game

• 1997 AI

• 1998 Pan European Website PS2

• 1998 Interactive TV

• 1999 Sprint0 etc

Technical Experience

Sectors & Clients

my skillset is domain agnostic and I have worked across the public, private and third sectors, including :

• technology• media & entertainment• arts & heritage• education & training• health & wellbeing• public sector & local government • national & inter/national security & defence

Simultaneously

• design and build digital artefacts• develop digital production methods• establish digital business, management and migration models• devise transformational strategies

Defining Complexity

Complex or Complicated ?

In popular dialogues, describing a system as 'complex' is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed

• transport networks• management infrastructure • supply chain logistics

2007 Cham, K.L. and Johnson, J.H., ‘Complexity Theory; a Science of Cultural Systems?’, ‘M/C Journal’, Complex, 10: 3, J. Cahir and S. James (eds.), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php

In socio-cultural terms 'complex' is used to describe those humanistic systems that are

‘intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories’

(Cahir & Johnson, 2004)

Complex or Messy ?

Complex Systems Science

The study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework, and has arisen from work in :

• artificial intelligence and robotics research• thermodynamics• biology• sociology• physics• economics • law

Complex Systems Theory

Complexity theory grew out of General Systems Theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon :

• the links and interactions between the component parts

• their relationship to each other

• the environment within they exists

General Systems Theory

Bertalanfys 1969 ‘General Systems Theory’ allows us to have a common theoretical perspective on diverse types of systems such as :

• the mechanical systems of a car engine

• the biological system of a human heart

• the social systems of a school

(Bertalanfly, 1969)

Mother of All Models

Systems Thinking

More broadly, ‘‘systems thinking’ is best recognised as a dialectical method that breaks with logical and causal analyses to emphasize relationships within a whole

It can be traced from Socrates through Hegel to pragmatics as a means of identifying systemic principles common to different ‘systems’ from different perspectives

Design is ’The Science of the Artificial’ Herbert Simon (1969)

“Professional designers are masters of complexity. They create systems that did not previously exist, creating new knowledge about those systems. They deal with clients who don't know what they want or what is possible within their constraints. They know about system parts and the processes that can assemble parts to form new wholes with desirable emergent properties. They know about regulations and deal with regulators and authorities. They forecast and manage costs in the face of great uncertainty.”

Some designed system are complicated but do not have the hallmark features of complexity

Standing On The Shoulders of Giants

Professor George Rzevski is an academic, entrepreneur and consultant. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Design and Innovation at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK and Visiting Professor of Multi-Agent Systems at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany and Moratuwa University, Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he is involved in a number of advanced research projects in the fields of Complexity and Multi-Agent Systems.

Professor Nigel Cross is a British academic, a design researcher and educator, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at The Open University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Design Studies. He is one of the founder members of the Design Research Society In 1982 Cross published a journal article 'Designerly Ways of Knowing',[7] drawing on design research to show Design as having its own intellectual and practical culture as a basis for education, and contrasting it with cultures of Science and Arts and Humanities, culminating in the book Design Thinking (2011).[9]

Founder & Director, Complexity Research Group, London School of Economics & Political Science, London, UK; Senior Fellow in LSE IDEAS, Centre for the Study of International Affairs, Diplomacy & Grand Strategy; Visiting Professor at the Open University. Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems (2012-2014). British Civil Service, Department of Trade & Industry (1967-1983) UK and international policy and negotiation of EU Directives

Logical Causalities

Systems theory stands in stark contrast to conventional science which, based upon Descartes’s reductionism, aims to analysesystems by reducing phenomena to its component parts (Wilson, 1998)

Reductionism is most easily understood in the context of the ‘natural sciences’ where the nature of complicated phenomena is understood by reducing them to a more fundamental form, for example,

matter >molecule>atom>nucleus

Management, Communication, Logistics & Production

Pipelines

Top Down, Mass Communications

Siloes

An Industrial Manufacturing Model

Linear Business Models

Convergence

agile, human centred eco-systems that are in constant flux

the convergence of telecommunications, television and computing means

Non Linear Eco-Systems

companies that don’t adapt find that

digital disrupts livelihoods, marketplaces and economies

Pivot..Or Not

Complex Systems Attributes (Mittleton-Kelly, 2003)

• self-organisation (autopoeisis)

• emergence

• interdependence

• feedback

• space of possibilities

• co-evolving

• creation of new order

Embracing Comlexity in Design

• ‘Embracing Complexity in Design’ (ECiD) is a research project funded by EPSRC(Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) under the ‘Designing for the 21st Century’ initiative. ECiD is a unique research programme with the objective of understanding the part played by complexity science in design, and increasingly, the potential for design to play a major role in the emerging science of complex systems.

• In June 2007, a three day event was convened, in collaboration with the University of Brighton, to explore the question of what contribution the arts might make to the science of complex systems. An international, interdisciplinary group of artists, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, poets and performers were invited to explore the question from an academic research perspective and were given an open opportunity to describe, present, install, perform, screen, sing or dance their response to the brief below for open debate.

The Art of Complexity

• Complex systems are generally diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements. They are adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. The scientific study of complex adaptive systems encompasses more than one theoretical framework and is highly interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about living, adaptable, changeable systems.

• Art is interpreted in its widest sense. It includes diverse media, from painting to music and dance, from digital art to poetry and theatre, from sculpture to opera and photography. There are precedents for exploring interactions between art and science, and many art works can be viewed as complex systems. For this event the specific question concerns the science of complexity systems. Can art generate new ideas and help to solve problems? Can give means of communicating complexity? Can art provide new methods of scientific inquiry? Can art … ?

Disruptors

small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system egThe Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (2006) to Charlie Hebdo (2016)

A fairly straightforward Arabic writing of the name “Muhammad,”

accompanied, in much smaller letters, by the formula that typically follows

mention of his name by devout Muslims: “Blessings and peace be upon him”

Biomimesis

‘language is of the universe, like galaxies and eco-systems, it participates in what it represents’

Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS (2005)Ira Livingston

A Little Light Reading

‘Reconstruction Theory, Designing the Space of Possibility in Complex Media’ (2007)

in Special Issue: Performance Play: Technologies of presence in performance, gaming & experience design, International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, Vol 2&3: 3, Lizbeth Goodman, Deverill, Esther MacCallum-Stewart & Alec Robertson (eds), Intellect http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1386/padm.3.2-3.253_1?journalCode=rpdm20

• A digital interface may, for example, allow multiple ‘authors’ and multiple ‘readers’ to participate in a simultaneous and instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of their divergent interpretations of an artifact as part of a networked participatory process

• ‘reconstruction theory’ - a design methodology for the ‘space of possibility’ in ‘complex media’

‘Reality Jamming; Beyond Complex Causality in Mediated Systems’(2008)2008 Cham,K.L., ISEA 08, Singapore http://www.isea2008singapore.org/abstract/i-l/p338.html

It is clear through experience that there is some significant relationship between media representations and cultural effects. Yet as practice leads theory through the sheer velocity of technological change, experience outstrips theoretical understanding of the relationship between the sign and the signified, the simulation and the social, the model and the real

The proliferation of digital media means it is increasingly important to understand interaction per se, especially the interaction between systems of signification and the real

…all representational systems have a performative capacity for transformation of the real and that signification is a dynamic intermediate realm between the real and the conceptual

‘The Art of Complex Systems Science’ (2009)

• 2009 Cham, KL., In: Alexiou, Katerina , Johnson, Jeffrey and Zamenopoulos, Theodore, (eds.) Embracing Complexity in Design. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge. pp. 121-‐142 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415497008/

The scientific study of complex systems encompasses more than one theoretical framework, as it is has had to be highly interdisciplinary in seeking answers to fundamental questions about adaptable, changeable systems.

This paper aims to set out the proposal that a post-structuralistapproach can deliver ontological bases that will provide complex systems science not simply with diagrams and maps, nor even with the workable metaphors of visualisation, simulation and embodiment but with visualisability; that most elusive and 'scientific' of representations that shares a generative semantic relation with that which it represents

‘Architecture of the Image’ (2011)

2011 Cham, K.L., Electronic Visualisation in the Arts, EVA Conferences International, British Computer Society, London http://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/40614

as the abstractions of synergetic brand architectures and designed identity systems are used more and more to underpin user experiences, a type of distributed, networked, ‘cloud semantics’ can be recognised as the soft engineering of participatory semantic systems, where the emergent actual behaviours are the intentional result of generating metaphoric ‘virtual’ avatars for us all to involuntarily inhabit as part of the natural ‘autopoetics’ of the digital age

‘A Semiotic Systems Approach to User Experience Design’ (2012)

• 2012 Cham, K.L., 1st International Conference on Semiotics & Visual Communication, the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus http://www.cut.ac.cy/icsvc/

This paper argues that the designer must successfully integrate visual communication design, information architecture and usability by purposefully designing for semiotic autopoesis

a fundamental dialectic between structure and function must be designed into the system and its use

This proposal requires good UX designers to design diachronic grammatical structures that can adapt and evolve whilst consistently providing a coherent synchronic experience under multitudinous variables

Good user experience design ..requires designers to paint with language and leave it wet

Designing Complexity

analysis of the whole nested system your brand, your company, your marketplace, your product or service and value chain

defining the users, user stories and user journeysyour individual employees, clients, prospects and shareholders

understanding contexts, deployments and situationshow all this pans out in deployment, in micro and macro contexts including legal, geographical, social, technical

Complex Dive

existing behaviours, both socio-cultural and digitalsuch as in communications, manually taking minutes; using SAP, texting colleagues, CRMs, water cooler moments

stakeholders review and modelling complex relationshipsbetween staff, managers, shareholders, partners, investors, collaborators, clients, prospects etc

holistic review of micro and macro interdependenciessystems analysis of ‘butterfly effect’ small to large /large to small scale dependencies

Complex Mapping

current and future opportunities and threats across the marketplacefuture facing marketplace review isolating potential for dynamic change

current strengths and weaknesses of competitorsfull competitor review, analysis and benchmarking of key competitors

aims & functionalities of all touchpointshow your current and future touchpoints, internal and external, micro and macro perform in context

Micros and Macros

isolate the opportunities for change, both socio-cultural and technicalrecommendations on embedding engagement and motivation

define the digital transformation blueprint taking an agile, quick and dirty approach to picking up on the most dynamic points for quick and yet strategic wins

design and build of the bespoke digital intervention feedback loopbespoke intervention that scrapes data from key touchpoints and accelerates migration towards full transformation

Designing The Space of Possibility

IoT FOG, AR/VR & 5GInternet/Cloud/Servers

Core Network/Routers/regional

Access Edge Nodes (neighbourhood)

Gateway CPE

(building street)

Endpoint / Things

What makes sense of all the ‘things’ ?

Internet/Cloud/Servers

Core Network/Routers/regional

Access Edge Nodes (neighbourhood)

Gateway CPE

(building street)

Endpoint / Things

INTERFACE

USER

CUX in the FOG/AR/VR

Realtime, Connected and a ResponsiveFeedback loop, driven by an intelligent architecture

Users Experience

User Experience

Human Motives

Value Mechanics

Consumer as Producer; Value Mechanics in Digital Transformation Design, Process, Practice and Outcomes

in 'Cultural Policy, Innovation and the Creative Economy', Palgrave McMillan http://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9781349951116

R&D into cognitive UX patterns, data driven behaviour change and how we might enable navigation by instinct in immersive and mixed realities

23rd November, Marylebone