Updated Axioms of Complexity
Welcome to Complexity Design, a section on design and its limits.
Welcome to Complexity Design, a section on design and its limits. Below is an updated list of axioms of complexity.
Interconnected overrules design: complex systems are not designable
Emergence (‘it just happens…’ as one student informally articulated) is the opposite of design.
There is no navigating complexity without self-leadership.
Confusion is creativity. Creativity exists before language; anything else is production.
Being and doing, person and persona, complicated and complex are all proxies of the same tension.
Only by articulating dichotomies can we initiate the micro-movements necessary to change our world (/with integration in mind).
System is as complex as we need it to be: we can exercise reduction if the situation allows, and seek extra details (context) when the solution slides off the problem.
Complex systems are open-ended (beyond n-dimensions), hence a machine can never be intelligent.
Complicated systems–like a car, computer program, or highway system–are an elaborate stacking of known constructs.
Plans are always complicated, execution is always complex.
We can model the difference between complex and complicated as the difference between designing a highway system and designing fewer accidents.