One question that I’ve been dealing with a lot lately and that this post helps me explore is the difference between intentionality and agency, and how we might deal with that space between in the design process. Here you suggest designing for second order failures. Isn’t this deterministic, imagining that things might proceed from one state to the next and that somehow we might take that in to account? One of the most powerful ideas that your post brings up for me is a challenge to the prominence of efficacy or efficiency as the primary driver of decisions. One concept that meets this challenge is diversity, I think, and maybe motion. A corn field illustrates this point well.

And for other people: here’s a link to Drew’s post on Slavin’s talk.

Over time I’ve come to interpret Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’ as a particularly bureaucratic and strategic c.y.a. method of talking about emergence, or the stochastic nature of reality and of the unfolding of events. I might argue that whether something is hierarchically constructed (like Federal farming subsidies) or distributed and truly democratic, they can equally be co-opted by misaligned motives, or motives other than what might one intend or hope for. The process of how that happens might be quite different.

Might we also bring attentiveness and disposability into the discussion on unknown unknowns – particularly in terms of a design practice that might define itself as ’tactical’? Sometimes scenario design, and futurist predictions get it right; sometimes catalytic insertions work incredibly well based on the code written into them. This is when we are lucky, when unknown unknowns just happen to be in accordance with our schemes. But often the designs don’t work as planned (for better or worse), even with the best skills and foresight. Indeterminacy reveals itself. I don’t think we can avoid that. As Delanda also informs us, even inorganic matter displays surprising behaviors that we cannot predict, nonetheless the complexity of people’s motives. The very nature of prediction is problematic.

I bring up attentiveness because it provides a contrast to conventional design practice, one that acknowledges that we often can’t walk away after one go. Designers don’t like to talk about their failures, which is pretty egoistic and strange because that is where one actually gains traction with the complexity of reality – where one has interacted with and learned something about the unknown unknowns. Most design culture suppresses this (Accordingly we should start a design journal that’s all about failures, which is far more interesting that all the coverage of photoshoped future perfect and unrealized gloss)

Attentiveness entails a more iterative approach. If something doesn’t work, you recalibrate it until it does. One has to be watchful, attentive and engaged to do that (i.e. post occupancy evaluation) rather than just walking away after doing a set of construction drawings. Likewise, disposability entails the ability to move through iterations, discarding what isn’t effective or is superfluous. Software companies know this. They release a series of beta versions to get their product to where it finds traction with a receptive community.

Centralized and hierarchical structures are at a design disadvantage in this regard. Their process is too slow and cumbersome to be able to perform iteratively and responsively to unknown unknowns. They have to invest too much up front. Here the organic, the distributed and the tactical have an edge. They are faster and more directly engaged rather than mediated.