A Simple Guide to Complexity
One of these structures is more efficient than the other. Can you tell which one?
Follow up question, which of these do you understand at a glance?
The one on the left? Its fairly clear what that item is designed to do.
But which of these does a better job? The one on the right.
Humans love simplicity.
Left to right; Daybed, Headphones, Lamp - all courtesy of minimalissimo
You can see this in a lot of current design trends; sleek lines, neutral colours and no.more.buttons.
But I want to talk about the the value of complexity.
When we embrace complexity we can design effective solutions for real world problems.
There are three concepts of complexity:
Complex systems deliver outcomes for their users, not their viewers.
Simple does not always mean better
Legibility comes with expertise
Complex systems deliver outcomes for their users, not their viewers.
When looking at a complex process from the top down, it can seem like chaos.
But the ‘top down’ is not how the process is experienced by those involved in it.
Take a city for example, like New York or Sydney. If you jumped in a helicopter and flew over the city, you would see a blend of houses, businesses, attractions, train lines and people dotted everywhere.
Top down perspective
If you rearranged the city from this perspective, you might be tempted to rearrange windy roads into straight lines, evenly distribute parks or hospitals and make the train go from A to B without passing C.
All of this might make logical sense, maybe based on usage data or population density.
But as a human living in the city, your daily experience isn’t arranged like this.
You navigate to where you need to be along with the millions of other inhabitants, all gradually shaping and responding to the needs of the city.
A participant’s view.
A top down view of a system relies on external measures of success. For instance, if you decided that time to work is the most valuable metric, you would rearrange the city in a totally different way to if it was % of greenery or time to a hospital.
But none of these actually capture the multiple needs of a person living in the city. Sure, they want to get to work, but they will also socialise, eat, drink, buy groceries, require services and find ways to satisfy an infinite and unquantifiable number of needs.
The make up of a city then is responsive and reflective of the individuals who interact with it. We see this all the time - food trucks pop up outside popular venues, street art marks alleys less travelled, roads bend to existing landmarks and communities begin to form between like minded people.
Obviously, a city isn’t just mindless chaos, some law and order needs to exist but the point here is that, in order to understand the city, you have to be in it, not above it.
Looking top down provides one view but it doesn’t consider the millions of views tangled throughout.
Simple does not always mean better
The second concept is that simple does not always mean better
Particularly from a design perspective, we are drawn to simplicity; sleek lines, flow charts, minimal buttons or dials. Simplicity makes things easy to understand at a glance. But simple does not always mean better.
There are so many examples of this found in nature.
Take, an eco system, lets say the Great Barrier Reef. According to the Australian museum, there are 400 different species of coral, 4000 different species of mollusc, 500 species of seaweed,1500 species of fish, and 215 bird species, plus other animals like turtles and dugongs.
It’s complicated.
All of these creatures interact with each other in an almost infinite variety of ways. There are predator prey relationships, which we understand fairly well but also relationships we haven’t even scratched the surface of.
In this instance, these eco systems have been formed over millions of years. Millions of animals finding niches and adapting to their environment.
To map every interaction between not just animals, but bacteria and minerals and tides and weather would be impossible. Of course, no one would ever redesign a reef for simplicity. If they did it would probably look like this:
When we simplify processes, we are mostly doing it for one reason, legibility. We simplify the problem because we want to understand it better.
But there are problems that cannot be understood without acknowledging the complexity. Simplifying can help us explain the issue to others but you lose the opportunity for nuance.
It is tempting to fix problems in society with catchy slogans, black and white reasoning or snappy tweets (do we call them X’s now?). But they don't help us fully understand the complex interactions taking place.
This leads me to my last point, legibility of a complex system comes with expertise
Legibility comes with expertise
There is a principle called Chesterton’s Fence, which states you should never take down a fence before knowing why it was put up.
There could be an errant landmower on the other side, for example.
Without studying, knowing and fully understanding the systems underlying the problem you are trying to solve, you risk creating an even greater problem.
The legal system is a good example. Laws are created and revised as circumstances require them. Laws and precedents attempt to cover every scenario before (or slightly after) it occurs.
Langdell Law Library, Harvard
This has the effect of making the legal system impossible to comprehend without a law degree and significant experience. And even then, lawyers will specialise in one extremely specific area, limiting the scope as the laws get more and more complex. This specific expertise is what helps navigate a complex system.
Like our city example earlier, it is the difference between the overwhelming view from the helicopter, or a giant law library, and the individual experience of getting from home to work, via a café, or defending your home from the governments plan to extend the airport next door.
Is this 27 year old joke still relevant?
Imagine the alternative, a simplistic blanket law like “activities that harm another person are prohibited”. While initially the simplicity is appealing, the millions of ways you could interpret that statement would quickly cause chaos. “What exactly is harm? What about victimless crimes, property disputes, company mergers? Are animals included? If so, which ones?”
Sometimes the expert is just someone who actually uses the product or performs the service.
And like in all complex situations, there will be different experts with their own views and ideas – the point is to embrace it!
To summarise, when we embrace complexity we can start to design effective solutions for real world problems. To do this, we need to;
view systems through the eyes of the participants,
resist oversimplifying and
remember complexity becomes more legible the more you get involved.
See you next month!
