Category: Design

Screwed-up, evolvable protocols that out-learn well-designed solutions

Well Ted Nelson probably continues to be apoplectic over all this messiness, but Shirky is right. Thanks to Bruce Sterling for pointing me to something I had also missed at the time.

Also, yet another example of why evolution works without need for an intelligent designer.

Screwed-up, evolvable protocols that out-learn well-designed solutions.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Clay Shirky theorizing This essay was written eight years ago and I haven’t read it till now. I really dig it when you read some assertion about the Web that’s eight years old, and it makes better sense now than it did when it was written. Either Clay Shirky is impressively prescient, or this is some kind of genuine principle here. Maybe both! [Beyond the Beyond]

Weinberger on Orders of Organization

More insight from Weinberger. A while back one of my former Diamond colleagues, Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres made the observation that over the last twenty years, the rato of metadata to data has gone from 1 in 100 to 100 to 1. I didn’t really appreciate where she was going with that point, but Weinberger helps me understand.

Database design was a problem of getting the answer right the first time and ahead of use. It was driven by the cost and complexity of storage and of development. That strategy worked adequately for transaction systems, but fails for management information and knowledge work needs. What Weinberger makes clear is that the solution is twofold. One is to use metadata profligately. But the other, and more interesting, part is to not try to get the right answer once and for all or in advance. Rather, it is to postpone the answer until some particular user has a particular question they need to answer.

I used to think that the request for “flexible” information systems reflected laziness on the part of users. I was young and na ve. Weinberger points out what that request is actually seeking, why, and how to go about addressing it.

The Three Orders of Organization.

David Weinberger on the different orders of classification: “If you recall, we were all supposed to be lifeless at the bottom of an ocean of information by now. Why have we survived the information tsunami so confidently predicted in the late ’80s and early ’90s? Those predictions assumed that the principles of organization wouldn’t evolve. But they have. Rapidly and profoundly.”

He goes to explain by his three orders of organization:

  1. First Order: You arrange physical objects: You shelve books, you file papers, you put away your silverware.
  2. Second Order: You arrange separate, smaller objects that contain metadata about the first order objects: You create a card catalog. You make entries in a ledger. You index a book. You now have a second organizational scheme (e.g., the books are shelved by subject but the cards are arranged alphabetically), and it’s physically easier to navigate.
  3. Third Order: You create electronic metadata so you can organize it in ways that simply weren’t feasible before.

He gives emphasis on this third order, which is like a faceted classification scheme, as it gives more power to the users: “Keepers of the first two orders carefully build organizational schemes and taxonomies. Practitioners of the third carefully create metadata so that users can create their own schemes and taxonomies.”

[elearningpost]

Adams on Murphy

The corollary here is that the harder something is to get at or repair, the more likely that it will fail at an inopportune moment.

Adams on Murphy. Adams on Murphy —

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
— Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001), Mostly Harmless

(From Quotes of the Day – The Quotations Page.) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Dave Pollard on Blog Functionality

Dave Pollard has put together his cut at what blogging tools ought to be able to do from an average user perspective. While Dave is anything but an average blogger, this is an interesting line of thought.

Everyone has their own specifications for what they’d like blogs to do. Advanced users, comfortable with the technology and able to tweak their blogs to do some amazing (and some silly) things, are quickly leaving the rest of us behind, and there are millions of others who took a quick try at blogging, threw up their hands, and gave up.

This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster and simpler, at next to no cost. [How to Save the World]

Complexity and design

If you think that technological systems are complex, imagine what that implies for the combination of technological and social systems. The socio-technical systems arena has been a rich vein that’s been mined in the organizational design and development world for decades. In general, though, that literature has been ignorant of the world of systems design (and vice versa, of course). These are some of my favorite quotes on the topic and it’s so nice to see that someone else has done the work of assembling them for me :).

On Complexity.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
— C.A.R. Hoare

These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them, requires science to make a third great advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nineteenth-century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twentieth-century victory over problems of disorganized complexity. Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity. […] Impressive as the progress has been, science has by no means worked itself out of a job. It is soberly true that science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead. We must, therefore, stop thinking of science in terms of its spectacular successes in solving problems of simplicity.
— Warren Weaver

In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has draw upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units and taking averages. […] For systems between the small and large number extremes, there is an essential failure of the two classical methods. On the one hand, the Square Law of Computation says that we cannot solve medium number systems by analysis, while on the other hand, the Square Root of N Law warns us not to expect too much from averages. By combining these two laws, then, we get a third – the Law of Medium Numbers:

For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.

— Gerald M. Weinberg

[Incipient(thoughts)]

Learing caution in designing technology for organizations

There seem to be a whole series of great entries showing up in my aggregator around the theme of how technology interacts with the world at large (that’s the point of using RSS aggregators isn’t it?).

The more time I spend trying to mesh technology with organizations, the more cautious I become. I still believe that carefully designed and deployed technology is essential for organizations and societies that hope to survive. But that design has to factor in how human systems shape designed systems over time. One of my own design goals is to seek to channel and shape that evolution so that unintended consequences are a smaller percentage of the outcomes and that there is a higher probability that the unintened consequences are more likely to be desirable than undesirable. One important aspect of that is to be very clear in pointing out things I believe to be technologically impossible. Technology cannot be the right answer to every question.

Good and Bad Technologies.

Fred writes about Clay Shirky’s comments about good and bad technologies and freedom to innovate:

The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.

The narrow sense of freedom, in tech terms, is a freedom to tinker, to prod and poke and break and fix things. Good technologies — the PC, the internet, HMTL — enable this. Bad technologies — cellphones, set-top boxes — forbid it, in hardware or contract. A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.

And none of this would matter, really, except that in a technologically mediated age, our grand freedoms — freedom of speech, of association, of the press — are based on the narrow ones. Wave after wave of world-changing technology like email and the Web and instant messaging and Napster and Kazaa have been made possible because the technological freedoms we enjoy, especially the ones instantiated in the internet.

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world. Microsoft gears up the global publicity machine its launch of Windows 98, and at the same time a 19 year old kid procrastinating on his CS homework invents a way to trade MP3 files. Guess which software spread faster, and changed people’s lives more?

Simple, and so true!

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

A very accurate description of where we are going. Groups that fail to recognize this will not succeed. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]

Russell Ackoff resources on systems thinking

Like Jerry Michalski I’ve long been a fan of Ackoff’s. Here are two posts of Jerry’s from October that provide access to some of Ackoff’s insight and wisdom about how to think about complex design problems. All of these items are worth your time.

Idealized redesign

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a big fan of Russ Ackoff’s thinking. Frustrated because I couldn’t find a description of his methodologies for interactive planning and idealized redesign, I got permission to post a paper describing those processes (pdf format).

I began to write a summary, but it is so crisply written that I recommend you read it yourself. What I will say is that idealized redesign made me realize that if you never take the time to imagine what you really should be doing, as an individual or organization, you’ll never get there. It also brought home to me just how difficult a process redesign is, because we are so wedded to assumptions we don’t notice, historic business models and other, often dysfunctional baggage we take for granted.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:10 PM

Some seminal documents from Systems Theory

The discipline Operations Research (OR) has been highly influential. Robert McNamara and his Best and Brightest used OR techniques to plan and justify the way the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations ran the Vietnam… er, situation. (Eventually McNamara resigned, troubled by LBJ’s decisions.)

In 1979, Russ Ackoff wrote a paper that was a milestone in management thinking, though it is little known. Published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society at the height of OR’s influence, The Future of Ooperational Research is Past (pdf) indicted the ways that OR had come to be used by its many practitioners. Ackoff followed that paper with a more hopeful one, titled Resurrecting the Future of Operational Research (also pdf).

Shortly after he published these papers, Ackoff started the discipline of Social Systems Science and founded the Busch Center at Wharton, funded largely by Anheuser-Busch, one of Russ’s major clients over time. Russ now heads Interact Design in Philadelphia.

Like the idealized redesign paper I just posted, I have permission to post these two papers here. It’s not every day you can see history change just a bit as you read an article.

posted by Jerry Michalski at 12:25 PM

[Jerry Michalski’s Home on the Web]

Jaron Lanier on software scalability

Scalable Software ().

Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability.

The reason we’re stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they…

[The Bottom Line]

There was a time when I thought Lanier was just a flake with a good PR agent. Then I had the chance to listen to him speak at length about the deep challenges of technology development. He’s still in the tail of the distribution on a number of dimensions, but the quality of his thinking and insight into the opportunities and challenges of technology is in the right tail.

While checking out Lanier’s current thoughts on software, you might also want to look at his “One Half of a Manifesto.”