Purpose and its Implications in Complex Systems Design
Purpose is the goal against which all future value is measured; the implication of purpose in systems design is one giant nonlinear step further. The network effects of more contemporary systemic designs radically change the speed limits for the rate of change of choice within a system design, and importantly that system of systems that is society. Purpose and intention are the why of human choice. What purpose we can achieve and at what rate is largely determined by our design choices. As choice and physics clearly limit design, design limits choice.
Purpose is the coordinating principle of present action. I can have purpose and we can have purpose, however, for entrepreneurs, innovators, and designers, purpose is substantially more significant in its implications. The product of their actions enframe the lives of others, where others can be almost everyone. The ‘creators’ enframe both the means and the ends in which we live. Design makes the imagined possible, but at the opportunity cost of all other possibilities in that instance. That cost is all other realities displaced by the existence of the adopted design solution. This is being at the expense of all but one ought. Design limits choice. We design out all the other possibilities between the can of physics and the is of the everyday. Purpose matters for the individual, however the conditionally possible purposes available to that individual don’t exist in physics. They are a subset of all possibilities; they are the purpose we can see. Those possibilities are designed into the technologies and arbitrary laws that exist as rules manifest in the matter and energy of physics.
A system design determines subsystem technology design and individual behaviour for generations of devices enframed by that system. The 50-year-old systems design for digital music determines our listening behaviour today. The switching costs of right-hand drive roads will ensure our habits and technologies continue long after the demise of automotive subsystems like the internal combustion engine. A City’s design determines property boundaries and human behaviours that persist for centuries, and sometimes millennia. Systems reinforce the boundaries of other systems creating both positive network effects of networks and crucially, limiting choice in a Gordian entanglement of rules.
Today, people argue about the purpose of companies, and an entirely false left-right parody arises between the parody shareholder company of Milton Friedman and the concept of stakeholder capitalism. As interesting as it may seem to discuss a company’s commitment to a multiplicity of stakeholders, a company has a purpose whether it wants one or not. Supply creates demand, and it is only through the satisfaction of that demand that it creates the capacity to satisfy any other relationship. The demand is an input to a production function coordinated to purpose. Equally, the supplied good literally embodies a purpose, and it may assume a place in a larger defined purpose for a company with a business model beyond selling a single SKU. These conditions are unavoidable; all that remains is the degree to which that purpose is consciously understood by both consumers and the team that makes up the company.
Inspecting the physical universe helps us locate purpose. There isn’t a lot of evidence of purpose in what we can see of that vast expanse. If there is a lot of purpose in the universe, we should be able to detect in its order patterns that require purpose to explain cause and consequence. The state of matter and radiation we observe would require evidence of intention to explain their coordination, and yet there is very little evidence available to support that proposition. There should be a fossil record for information encoded into matter or radiation. For the longest time, we saw purpose in the patterns of sunrises, failed harvests, births, deaths and marriages, and yet the hand of purpose has largely not survived better explanations of the world. In subatomic structures, fractals, the unity preceding the big bang, or the ultimate order of our entropic eschaton, where beautiful patterns persist beyond our complete understanding, purpose may play a part. Then again, causation may simply still be subject to discovery. With or without purpose, for all the order that does exist, it exists as patterns in the information that is the universe. Largely, they are the fundamental rules of the physical universe, and where they are not, they are rules consistent with the physical universe.
Yet paradoxically, in our survey of the physical universe there is much evidence of purpose, and almost all of it is right here at home. Our planet teems with the types of order that acts as evidence of human purpose and intention. The observed growth rate of earth’s order suggests that purpose is subjective, relative, and emergent, and doesn’t just correlate to simple metrics like population.
Technology is a production function defined in relationship to a sentient agent’s purpose, as such it is always both embodied rules and property. Our agency is extended by technology. Purpose is an end state, where technologies are means to ends. What is at stake in the designer’s choices are both fitness of our purpose, and our technology’s fitness for purpose. Purpose belongs to sentient agency, and technologies can only have targets defined by agency. In a sense, technology can be seen to be the control system of human existence. The value of that control system is measured in its performance toward the purpose we can achieve. Our choice in the physical universe clearly limit design, design limits choice.
