Tag Archives: Complexity

In The Plentitude¹, Rich talks about the four (4) hats he wore through his life – Artist, Scientist, Designer and Engineer and how they are different.  He then goes into seven (7) “Patterns” that these select hats have in common.  These patterns are used to different degrees, in different combinations, by different hats, to create the stuff around us.  They are as follows:

1. Necessity is the mother of all invention – Find a problem and solve it.
2. It’s a thing of genius – I had a vision and just had to do it.
3. The big kahuna – Scientific deduction of stuff from 1st principles.
4. The future exists – We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment.
5. Colonization – Find the unowned: Package it: Sell it back.
6. Stuff desires to be better stuff – Humans are how stuff makes stuff.
7. Change the definition – Language and metaphor create/are the world.

Later in the book he talks about his perspective on spending a life designing stuff.  One of the interesting observations that he made was that “stuff” in a room – stuff that was designed – is fractal.  In other words – my chair was designed.  Of the chair, the fabric was designed.  Of the fabric, the thread was designed.  Etc.  The complexity and design persists at each level.

On page 79 he makes some interesting observations:

“The student engineers saw the world as a series of problems to be solved and assumed that by solving these problems the world would become simpler, nicer, more humane.  The computer, for instance, would simplify office work by making it more pleasant to spend eight hours at a desk.  In reality, of course, such solutions are not only almost always more complex than the system they are trying to fix, but they are additive, layering on top of old solutions.”

“Now student designers, when they are asked to design, say a new toy, imagine the child is playing with just that one toy.  All alone in a prestine child’s room.  But that isn’t how children play.  A toy is just a component in a vast configuration composed of multiple toys…. All designed stuff is additive.”

He goes on to ask:

“Ok, Rich, why do you continue to make stuff for the plenitude?  You could ask this because I just laid out five compelling reasons for us to seriously consider that the Plenitude is not a good thing:

• First , it causes an uglieness that damages.
• Second, it blurs the distinction between the real and the virtual to a point where we can’t act intelligently.
• Third, it seems to keep one half of the world in dire poverty.
• Fourth, it looks as if it is on the verge of destroying the planet.
• Fifth, if Plenitude doesn’t destroy the planet, it will re-engineer nature into a product that will.”

To that, he ends the book with a quote from Stu Card “We should be careful to make the world we actually want to live in.”.