10. Designing For Self-Organization

This course presents an overview of the key principles of systems design. The course should help you gain a basic understanding of key concepts in systems thinking and complexity theory and how these can be applied in the design of complex systems of all kind.

Self-organization is the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions between initially independent components. Think about people crossing the street. There is no one orchestrating the process, but through the local interactions between people they become differentiated out into a distinct pattern with the formation of coordinated streams of people going in each direction.

Without formal design and centralized coordination, components interact in a nonlinear-networked fashion. The type of organization and patterns that result from this are defined by the type of interactions between the components and incentives they experience - not the design pattern that was imposed on the system.

With systems design, we aim for global coordination through the process of self-organization that requires an initial state of lack of control, adaptive components, dense interactions as an enabling context, and incentives towards certain attractor states from which order emerges.

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[TemperedWambat]

Is this course different from previous playlist youve created or does this focus specifically on designing systems?

[BrunoGabrielAraujoLebtag]

I think you meant: do not design to have control but some order instead.