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).

via | Network Weaving

After the post where I wrote about flocking algorithms used in a site-specific art/design installation by Todo Design, I ‘d like here to write about another experiment with such algorithms.

While surfing on Vimeo I found this video by Aaron Westre from Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), where he explains very well his master’s degree thesis on using flocking algorithms in order to design 3D architectures; here’s the video:

Introduction to Complexity Machine 1 from Aaron Westre on Vimeo.

Moving between design, science and computation Aaron Westre developed his his own software (you can download it here), “Complexity Machine 1” using the open source software Processing, where he runs his behavioral simulation describing the rules of the agents.

What is interesting in this project, is that the complexity of a system is not used as just inspiration or decoration, but as whole different way to design a structure, as if it were designed or modeled by a flock of birds.
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code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization is an application created by Michael Ogawa with Processing, that gathers data about the history of an open source / free software community and visualizes it in a video. Here’s the video for the Python programming language:

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.

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Back from Toshare.it, where I saw some interesting projects and met very interesting persons…

From there, I’d like to suggest you a project that shows how design could get inspiration from complexity. This is maybe the first step a designer could take confronting complexity, and therefore projects like this are not only fascinating but also promising for a new culture of complexity.

It is a simple adaptation of flocking algorithms for a site-specific video projection on an architecture (design-complexity-locality linked altogether?), designed by Turin-based Todo Design design studio.

Here is the project:

ARTIFICIAL.DUMMIES from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

And here is the design process…

Artificial Dummies, the process from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

These flocking algorithms come from the work of Craig Reynolds (where you can find a lot of links about flocking and swarm algorithms).

You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary.

via | reddit

A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal and/or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest and/or most easilly navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire lines were used in early transportation planning, prior to the advent of computerized models.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g. as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tred a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail ‘of least resistance’ for followers.

Similarly they may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface. The paths take on a rather organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest route between two points and may later be surfaced.

Desire lines can usually be found as shortcuts in places where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

Many streets in old cities began as desire lines which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

via wikipedia