combining top down with bottom up

In a recent post to his Technium blog, Kevin Kelly, with his usual eloquence, reminds us that, “now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well” (emphasis his). The key reason for this, Kelly goes on to say, is time. Pure ‘bottom up’ does not operate on a time scale requisite with our ‘instant culture’. In his words:

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.

What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness.

It strikes me that this combination of design and hive-ness is precisely what enables a process such as a DesignShop to facilitate the conception and emergence of ideas from within a community of participants (i.e., the ‘bottom’) and then develop them into definable, actionable solutions over the course of just a few days.

slow design, accelerated solutions

Going through my archives earlier in the week, I uncovered “Slow + Design” a manifesto of a “slow approach to distributed economy and sustainable sensoriality” that was published in preparation for a 2006 seminar on the subject taking place in Milan.

Using the Slow Food movement as a starting point, the authors first outline the slow approach as

the simple, but in current times revolutionary, affirmation that it is not possible to produce and appreciate quality if we do not allow ourselves the time to do so, in other words, if we do not activate some kind of slowdown. However, slow does not only mean this. It also means a concrete way of actually putting this idea into practice. It means cultivating quality: linking products and their producers to their places of production and to their end-users who, by taking part in the production chain in different ways, become themselves coproducers.

Turning to “design”,

we can observe that a “new design” is emerging: a design that adopts a systemic view, that looks at the complexities of social networks, develops a capacity for listening and interrelates with the creativity and diffuse entrepreneurship that characterise contemporary society. In so doing it becomes an active part of the transformation processes underway and in those that must take place, confronted as we are with the enormous issues at stake.

These passages — and many others in the 27-page document — resonate as strongly with me today as they did when I first encountered the manifesto a year and a half ago. From my perspective as a Process Designer grounded in the practices and methods of MG Taylor, my fascination is in seeing how “slow design” can enable groups, organizations and communities to accelerate their path toward solutions.