Front cover image for Design unbound vol. 1. Designing for emergence in a white water world

Design unbound vol. 1. Designing for emergence in a white water world

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world. 'Design Unbound' presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world-rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems. In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. 'Design Unbound' not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, 'Design Unbound' draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes
Print Book, English, 2018
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2018
440 pages.
9780262535793, 0262535793
1057701166
Volume 1. Designing for emergence
volume 2. Ecologies of change