Co-Evolutionary Design

The recognition that there are multiple loops of anticipation, reflection and feedback going on in design, is by no means new. Some stepping stones as we have shaped our collective understanding, are interesting and evocative. The very notion that what we shape, shapes us, has various left traces, some captured in QuoteInvestigator's exploration of:

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Tools, systems, users in sociotechnical systems -- of systems, environments. Intentions even. They are all interacting. As Merrelyn Emery, put it:

"Systems and environments are mutually determining or coimplicative."

Meir Lehman (1980) observed:

"The installation of the program together with its associated system [..] change the very nature of the problem to be solved. The program has become a part of the world it models, it is embedded in it. Analysis of the application to determine requirements, specification, design, implementation now all involve extrapolation and prediction of the consequences of system introduction and the resultant potential for application and system evolution. This prediction must inevitably involve opinion and judgment."

On the understanding that our system will change its context (its users, the systems they work within, more), we anticipate how so, and part of what we are doing is building, probing and testing our understanding of the system's impact. That's a lot to have going on, and we do this imperfectly, of course. Not least because our system and the changes it introduces into its contexts, are not all that is changing in the world. There's so much ambiguity and uncertainty, and:

“We're driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using only the rear-view mirror.”  (via Alan Kay)

That's a vivid way to say we project forward, based on experience. We use our imagination; we anticipate. And we draw on multiple perspectives, broadening the experiences we draw on. Further, we progressively evolve the system, so that we can get feedback and update our understanding, including our assumptions and projections. Or we try. "It's complicated" in that relationships meme and uncertainty sense, that is a euphemism for complex.

At any rate, we might (or ought to) work to learn how to better design with this in mind:

"the ways in which designers design, the ways in which design is ontological, even at a human product scale, because it creates worlds, habits, dispositions. A designer is never [..] just designing a product: they are reinforcing particular models of the human” — Cameron Tonkinwise

That is, we're trying to bring consequences of our design (decisions) into view as we design, and these (might, or ought to) include not just immediate impact, but broader impacts. Still, we are limited creatures, with bounded individual, team, and broader cognitive load capacity and we don't have crystal balls or other magic, with respect to futures that are unfolding (or being cut off). So we're balancing how much we can and should do in terms of, to return to Lehman, this:

"extrapolation and prediction of the consequences of system introduction and the resultant potential for application and system evolution"

In this balancing, given uncertainty, some incline to "just try a very small thing, and see what happens." The effect, though, is that the system touches and changes the world, even in small shifts. So we still need to ask, and return to: what reality are we (co-)constructing* here? Is it one we want more of?

"the wish [or intention] confronts an environment as altered by the wish; the environment confronts a wish as altered by the environment” — Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience, 1924

Further Reading

More here (see page 39 and 42): Systems and Leadership, October 2022

Also, there's a wonderful essay on "Ontological Designing" by Anne-Marie Willis

Footnote

* That's a nod towards Christiane Floyd's wonderful essay, Software Development and Reality Construction, in the book of the same title.