Even if you already know (almost) everything about Complex Systems, don’t miss the opportunity to watch online The Secret Life of Chaos, an excellent BBC documentary.
The documentary starts from Alan Turing and his research on morphogenesis, it then explains chaos (“one of the most unwelcome discovery in science”), feedback loops, fractals, flocks, evolution, self-organization. The documentary ends with evolutionary and genetic algorithms for solving problems and designing, showing how simplicity evolves into complexity, starting from simple rules repeated over and over. After watching this documentary, it should be very clear why design could (and should) learn how to deal with complex systems, even though we should update our idea of designer:

One of the things that makes people so uncomfortable, about this idea of, if you will, spontaneous pattern formation is that somehow or other you don’t need a creator. But perhaps a really clever designer, what he would do, is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen, in all of it’s wonder, and all of it’s beauty.

And then if you go on and read Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos by Ko Kuwabara (and this article as well), you will understand why I think that open source is a great strategy for dealing with complex problem and systems.

(Just a note about complexity and pop culture: after watching this, I bet it is easier for you now to understand that Tron:Legacy is about the dualism chaos vs. order, and why the movie prefers the former).

A complexity culture, especially in the design field, has to pass through the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity too.
Therefore, projects that derive from concepts of complexity, even if just superficially (and so are not complex nor systemic projects) are important for their ability to spread in society an aesthetics of complexity.

Such a project can be complexcity, designed by Lee Jang Sub and hand-made produced by the Spanish enterprise Granada Design.

This project is an exploration to find a concealed aesthetic by using the pattern formed by the roads of the city which have been growing and evolving randomly through time, thus composing the complex configuration we experience today.

I perceive the city’s patterns as living creatures that I recompose to form an urban image.

This project which started from Seoul where I was born and have grown in, is expanding to other cities all over the world.

Lee Jang Sub

In this project, the complexity is a mere decorative expedient: the shape is Euclidean and two-dimensional, the function limited to pure decoration and the production-distribution-consumption system is extremely conventional. Therefore, it is not a real complex project, but the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity (and in this case, the complexity of a territory), passes necessarily through such initiatives.

via | mocoloco