Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” attempts to connect the lives of ants, brain activity, urban interaction, and software to show how decentralized and bottom-up interactions emerge as an intelligent swarm.
I was at first skeptical about the book, as it seemed to take a very scientific view, which I am wary of given my thesis on design thinking and its relation to a scientific approach to solving problems. But I got over myself and began to appreciate the perspective and what it might mean for interaction design. (Notably, the word “interaction” is repeated a lot throughout the book.)
The behavior of ant colonies forms the backbone of the thinking behind the book. Despite popular belief, ant colonies have no pacemaker, meaning there is no top-down authority that tells the colony what to do. The queen does not give directions, she only lays eggs. The rest of the ants base their behavior on interactions with their compatriots using a very simple language using pheromones. Through the numbers of these low-level decisions by individual ants, the colony as a whole exhibits characterizable behavior.
“The colonies take a problem that human societies might solve with a command system (some kind of broadcast from mission control announcing that there are too many foragers) and instead solve it using statistical probabilities. Given enough ants moving randomly through finite space, the colony will be able to make an accurate estimate of the overall need for foragers or nest-builders.”
When I read that the ants made decisions through statistical samples of the overall population, it seemed related to how designers make decisions based on a small, but rich interaction with sample users. Given millions of design decisions resulting from random sampling of the population, will there emerge a better world for all? That’s the hope that a greater design culture brings.
Another intriguing argument is that through local interactions higher-level order emerges. One prime example given is the benefit of sidewalks in increasing local interaction of city dwellers. Neighborhoods often develop, not because someone planned them, but through interaction with others—individual decisions about where an how to live creates an order. Examples include class divides, ethnic areas, and gay neighborhoods.
Good designers recognize that they have only so much control in the way that there solutions are used. Johnson points out that emergent systems are not without rules. In fact they need rules to prevent chaos. This seems a likely place for design to contribute: by understanding the system as a whole and providing the rules for interaction, but not dictating how interaction should take place. Not all interactions can or should be designed. There is room to allow emergent behavior to determine the interaction, rather than interaction being dictated by the designer.
Does this sound a bit like co-creation or allowing users to design their own experience? I think so. To encourage emergent systems, Johnson suggests that in addition to rules, incentives should also be provided. For designers interested in allowing users to design their own experience, incentives for participation are paramount because they encourage investment and support.
Johnson entertains the principles of emergence being applied to all aspects of human activity, from social organization to urban planning to business management to political systems. For businesses looking for innovation, an emergent approach is worth considering. Johnson suggests an organization made up of smaller teams that act without top-down dictation.
“The role of traditional senior management grows less important in these models—less concerned with establishing a direction for the company, and more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas.”
Through the lens of design, you could see this as employees designing their own work experience. With groups making the best decisions at the local level, the overall system would be more efficient and innovative. This idea definitely gains my interest, having worked in too many places where decisions made from above hurt the experience of employees and the effectiveness of the organization; and where everyone at the local level knew how to make productive changes but were discouraged and prevented from doing so.
Perhaps what I appreciate most about “Emergence” is Johnson’s ability to make connections between seemingly tangential subjects, as making connections is what good designers do. Overall, it’s an interesting read with insights into emergent behavior that are worth considering and perhaps bringing into current and future design challenges.
Comments
4 responses to ““Emergence” (book review)”
This sounds like a great book, and very relevant to my project. I feel like I’ve flipped through it, or had someone explain the premise to me before. Another book, that Stacie recommended to me, and which I have yet to read is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It seems like a quick read, I just happened to lose it somewhere in my apartment.
The top-down vs bottom-up thing seems to be core issues that I have when thinking about anything design related, and if I were to start over my paper would definitely talk about it more. I think top-down change or design can be beneficial in terms of standardization and replaced deeply broken systems, but with lots of negative issues as well.
The other interesting thing is random samples. While what we do is somewhat random to us, it’s not technically random in the scientific sense. But we’re also not necessarily trying to generate knowledge about users that is repeatable. So where does that leave us? Are we really getting good data about people or is it just a quirk of the of people we encounter? Or maybe the validity of the data doesn’t matter, and it’s up to use to judge whether it’s useful to us or not. It seems like the latter puts a lot more responsibility on the designer to be able to justify their decisions and communicate them properly, especially if it contradicts something else that is found. We don’t necessarily have a table of numbers to point to as evidence, but instead a story to tell and connections that we make to the current design situation. But does that cut it in a society that is so based on scientific validity? Is our society based on scientific validity or is it just certain professions that require it?
Gah, didn’t mean for the lengthy comment, just thinking aloud.
Scientific validity has certainly been emphasized in our society for the past couple hundred years. That does not mean that design isn’t practiced. I believe everyone practices design but does not recognize it because there isn’t a focus on it. While we all design, we are not educated about design, and thus do not know how to increase our design potential. My hope is that design will become more fundamental and recognized as a rigorous process that can coexist with scientific approaches.
I just heard the author discussing his book on NPR. And found the topic interesting. The thought occurred to me, “this is creating order out of chaos and in contradiction to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the principle of increasing entropy.” Not being a physicist, I will need some time to sort this out and may end up buying the book. :-)
Major Dale raises an interesting question: Does emergence which seems to create order out of chaos contradict the second law of thermodynamics? The short answer is no. Emergence requires large numbers of entities that follow a set of rules and generally a reward when the rules are followed. Atoms and molecules follow only the laws of physics. In a sense you could say this a form of emergence. Given a large number of atoms you can predict with near perfect certainy what the average macro properties – pressure, temperature.. will be.
My name is Sam and I teach physics.