System Research - Nour Diab Yunes

Meadows’ Leverage Points in Complex Systems

"[R]ules for self-organization […] govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions." (Meadows, 1999:15)

Self-organizing structures allow a system to change, evolve, and sustain itself as external actors and internal entities affect and impact its systemic structure overtime; thus, developing new response mechanism and enacting new rules and behaviors.

The decentralized mindset

Decentralized Computing emerges from the understanding of self-organizing systems in nature. This model, by its implicit plurality and distributed scope, makes use of the behavioral patterns and systemic structures of micro-world organisms to facilitate communication between objects (hardware) and non-objects (software). It allows individual devices to communicate as a unified whole. For Mitchel Resnick (1994) decentralization is crucial to redrafting our images of ourselves and the larger social and environmental system we live in.

“calm technology” (Weiser & Brown, 1996)

According the Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1996), "peripheral information" extends the notion of "affordances" to describe action enabling technologies that are reachable, yet on the periphery of perception and therefore encalming.