Seal Ecosystem: the Food Web (detail)
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Why Design should learn how to relate to Complexity to understand Sustainability?
Because, according to me, the lack of understanding the unsustainability of society is also a problem of lack of understanding the complexity of the natural, social and economic (complex) systems in which we live. The attempt of reduction (or overappreciation) of Complexity has born with Modernity, that has applied it to the social, natural and territorial systems (leading us towards the unsustainability we face now).
For Rullani Modernity (and in special way the great fordist company) generates artificial environments with reduced complexity, that let one control the behaviour of the agents. And a modernity that proceeds reducing the complexity of the human and social dimension has few points of contact with the territory, that is a layered and localized synthesis of history, culture and of relations between men and the ecosystem. In the theory and the practice of the modern economy, the territory has disappeared; artificial spaces with a a reduced complexity for the convenience of calculation have replaced it.
A territory without complexity is a territory without quality, one of the many places (or non-places), accumulations produced by the economic algorithm. If Design is interested about the territory (to improve its quality), it must face this complexity.
This reductionist strategy has been proving, during the years, to be effective only in the short term, having increased instead problems and secondary effects in the long term, especially on the sustainability side. Nowadays, most of the people still to consider sustainability in a reductionist way, searching single practical and technological solutions to single problems, and not systemic solutions for the complexity of the social system.
However, there is an emerging awareness of the importance of facing complexity to attain sustainability, through the reevaluatiion of the local dimension as the specific place of action. The complexity of the society and of the ecosystems in which it resides demand the understanding of the hidden connections at the local and global scale. In order to understand where the economical practices (and therefore also the design practices) are leading us, we must understand the hidden connections between the economic, social and natural systems, and the feedback that they generate between each other. Sustainability, at the local and globl level, has an unavoidable complex dimension.
Our society, our economy, and the ecosystems in which we live (and from which we draw resources) are complex systems that interact between each other; the lack of understanding of their connections (and therefore of their complexity) leads to the lack of understanding of the initiatives that are really necessary for reaching sustainability. In a complex system, the connections between all the elements of the system represent the architecture that supports it and allows is survival. The elimination of a single element can provoke unpredictable effects, eventually leading to the collapse of the entire system (in an ecosystem, for example, all the living beings in it). And therefore the same thing happens also in the social system and the economic system: every action (also the design ones) must be thought without underestimating the complexity and the connections between the elements.
Seal Ecosystem: the Food Web (whole)
In these connections between social, economic and natural systems, the designer lives and therefore Design acts, and it can perhaps learn from the Open P2P Communities how to manage this variety of elements and directions. The diversity is the main characteristic of the nature and the foundation of the ecological stability, and the Open P2P Communities introduce some suitable practices to valorize the diversity of their own participants, succeeding in the construction of a collective intelligence based on an open and tolerant peer-to-peer learning.
Open P2P organizational forms and principles are very defined, but still loose in some way, that there is someone that believes they represent Anarchy, Communism, perfect free market and therefore Capitalism, or that they are not Communism (or something similar), or maybe a radically different phenomenon, that we should study better.
Therefore, it’s possible to study how to modify and apply these community-based organizational forms, as they can be adapted to many situations: their flexibility has made them so widespread. We could use Open P2P organizational forms in order to diffuse questionable activities like military activities, control activities, or activities that, with an increase of their scale, could lead to an increase pollution and the gap between rich and poor (representing an awful future). Or we could use them in order to diffuse sustainable activities from the social, economic and natural point of view.
We can see these organizational forms like a box: they have a shape (the values and practices), but it is the content that give them a sense and a direction. A content that it must be adapted to the shape of the box, but we have seen that it is flexible enough: it is necessary therefore to decide which contents we should use. As this organizational forms are so suitable to manage complexity, it is possible to choose them for complex entities such as the territory and its sustainability, and therefore for a Design directed to this issues.
Design, Locality, Open Source, P2P, Web 2.0… are therefore the center of my research (and of this website), but I’m going to analyze them from the complexity and sustainability point of view. And I’m going to analyze all the cases that are not explicitly related to sustainabilty, as they could be useful in order to understand how to spread sustainable activities.
Then we should know something more about Open P2P Communities and about how Design can be used for them…
(to be continued)
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