archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Good design is the result of an unusual mix of two very dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing that must work together to a com­mon end; reduc­tive approaches (to define a prob­lem) and holis­tic approaches (to solve — or rede­fine — the prob­lem by con­sid­er­ing every aspect).

The com­bi­na­tion is a pow­er­ful syn­the­sis which relies on a bal­ance between com­pet­ing forces.

Design­ers have under­stood the impor­tance of this bal­ance — and thus the indis­pens­able role of holis­tic think­ing in design meth­ods — for a long time. But as a con­se­quence of the long-standing dom­i­nance of indus­trial pro­duc­tion processes and log­ics, which elim­i­nated or severely restricted oppor­tu­ni­ties for most peo­ple to design any part of the fab­ric of their every­day lives, holis­tic approaches and think­ing have had min­i­mal vis­i­bil­ity in the mod­ern cul­tural land­scape.

That seems to be chang­ing, and I sus­pect few would dis­pute the rise in vis­i­bil­ity and impor­tance of design within the cul­tural land­scape. Some might say we are in the midst of a renais­sance of design (that com­par­i­son breaks down under a crit­i­cal lens, in the end demon­strat­ing more the pos­i­tive aspi­ra­tions of design advo­cates than any­thing else).

Look­ing at the cul­ture as a whole, the rise of design is one aspect of a larger and much more impor­tant cul­tural shift: the rise of holis­tic think­ing. This shift towards holis­tic views is chang­ing the things we talk about and think about, and hold cen­tral as the ele­ments of our basic frame of ref­er­ence — in short, the way we con­ceive of the world.

The con­cepts in the list below are good exam­ples of the rise of holis­tic think­ing across dis­ci­plines and fields. Seem­ingly willy-nilly (which is exactly the point!), all these ideas rely on, include, or enhance holis­tic view­points at some level:

• net­works
• col­lec­tive intelligence
• emer­gence
• the Inter­net
• sys­tems thinking
• glob­al­iza­tion
• design think­ing
• sus­tain­abil­ity
• cross-cultural com­mu­ni­ca­tion
• cli­mate change
• ethnog­ra­phy
• multi-culturalism
• pat­terns
• com­plex­ity
• inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion / localization
• social media
• the mashup
• ecol­ogy
• remix­ing
• col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­duc­tion models
• the green movement
• open source
• urban­ism and urban plan­ning
• the cre­ative class
• archi­tec­ture of participation
• the knowl­edge economy

It’s no acci­dent that this list is also an index of many of the major ideas and con­cerns of our day. What does it mean? Well, it’s good for design at the moment. And maybe there’s a book in it for some­one with the time to syn­the­size an idea and work up a solid treatment…