Andreu Ulied, planner
Xavier Font, project designer
 

 
 
   
   
 
The challenge for the designers creating operating systems is to find an appropriate balance between a pre-designed and under-designed system; to propose a meta-system that promotes creativity without adding further layers of prescriptive control. Such a design strategy, besides design being adjusted to personal needs, offers also a potential to create a collective social space.
Following the idea of separation the design process into different hierarchical levels, instead of an architect controlling the overall system we could think of a contrary case, where an engineer or architect controls the design of individual parts, constructing the whole system, and the interactions between them.
In that case we have to do with a self-organizing system, where the final outcome is an emergent result of a real-time interaction between individual parts. Architect, who designs only individual components and their local interactions, also has limited control over the whole system, since the ultimate effect depends on interaction dynamics between the different components and the environment. The key- attribute of emergent complexity is its tolerance and adaptability to changeable conditions, much more flexible and responsive to alternations than complexity programmed and predesigned as a whole. Distributed types of systems are also more efficient, since every single component is responsible just for its own simple behaviour, while by combining them collective intelligence and complexity is being accomplished.
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