Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.
In this overview of open practices in the business world, directed at designers who wonder “how to design for the loss of control“, Tim Leberecht insists, taking Wikileaks as a case study, that there is no openness without secrecy:
“an ecosystem on the Social Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis – it is always in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if we understood “designing for the loss of control” as designing for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of planning and programs (the “Push” model) so despise. At their own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation. “Designing for the loss of control” means designing for variance.
One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for its content very much depends on a highly controlled environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks’ “there are no secrets” claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there is no WikiLeaks without secrets.
Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.”
September 21st, 2010 at 9:59 am
A somewhat unexpected but perfectly understandable principle.
Conditions depend on dichotomy and intermediate scaling.
At the extreme ends is the dichotomy of opposites (good/bad, light/dark, open/closed, cold/hot).
Inbetween those is the scale of relative values, which could be expressed in percentages or degrees or with qualifiers such as “very open”, somewhat open”, “mostly closed”, very much closed”.
Binary computer logic, by the way, is highly inefficient because it misses all the nuances between “1″ and “0″. At the basic binary level, there are no maybes, only yes and no, which means that all nuances (fuzzy logic for example) have to be expressed at the Software level.
May 14th, 2011 at 8:59 pm
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann described this as a feature of auto-poietic systems i.e. system is closed in terms of its operational binary code, while open to its environment. Instead of being in “crisis”, Luhmann said that systems are permanently irritated by the signals of their environment. This kind of open/closed system design enables its functioning in the first place.