The app, an Object, allows the user (Agent) to navigate a specific Environment. What some might consider a problem space. The Environment is both map and territory.

The narratives (sometimes abstracted into interfaces) that the creators use to guide the Agent through the Environment are almost always in monotone. A new theory of design would benefit from the creation of new narratives, ones that can be blended, spliced, overlaid and explored from multiple perspectives.

Designing a multi-faceted narrative to navigate these Environments would reveal and thus confirm the underlying systematic foundation inherent to this (and all) technology.
It would acknowledge the rhizomatic pathways that hijack imposed attempts at linear path-making (and path-taking).
And it would encourage an orientation towards the design of flexible boundary spaces, filled with Emptiness (per Kenya Hara) within which we can encourage the emergence of Agent defined paths, that deemphasize the pre-defined and pre-designed paths formed the creators.

The (digital) product is a map, offering one particular rendering of a territorial “problem space” along with the creator’s recommended path to best navigate it.

Iterations are attempts to swiftly update this map to match the present reality of that territory.

It’s important to acknowledge that both the map and territory are ultimately designed, because boundaries must be drawn and relationships intuited when defining the exact problem, the space it creates, the properties of that space and recommended paths for navigation.

A Quarter Century Of Symbiotic Bonding

The internet has been ingesting the world's information in increasing quantities over the last 25 years. It has now symbiotically bonded to the physical, non-digital systems of civilization, which regress from the trauma: the splintering of consensus reality, the rise of radicalization, and an explosion of Truths.

The economic incentives of feeding it this information, and the permissionless innovation it enables appear to seed what could be termed "internet-native" models for economic activity, incentivization, coordination and the archetypal human.

The internet is our species' first planetary-scale infrastructure. It might also be the catalyst for a shift to a planetary-scale civilization.

Symbiosis is a mechanism that allows systems to adapt faster than if they were to rely on a strict evolutionary process to achieve the same internal augmentation. The calorie (energy) cost is scalable and depends on the type of symbiotic relationship.

Much of our software is symbiotic, today. It relies in a web of dependency on dependencies - small libraries that provide discrete functionality, where it doesn’t make sense to build that functionality internally. A lot of the internet’s infrastructure is accessible via web APIs that extend the utility of software systems. They increase flexibility and adaptability in exchange for an energy cost (translated into money, our poor abstraction of it).

The users of your software are doing so to extend a specific aspect of their individual or collective physiology, like I am using Are.na, here, as an artificial memory store. Or a team might use it to encourage a collaborative exploration of an idea or concept.

The role of the designer today is in the design of relationships and the study of symbiosis. It is a fundamental primitive.

Connection Threshold As The Catalyst From Simple to Complex Digital Systems

At some point, simple digital systems breach a threshold at transform into complex ones.

This threshold might be the total number of connections, or "possible interactions" that a system accommodates. With each new feature and user, these systems rapidly multiply the total number of possible interactions that can be initiated.

At the point of the breach, an invisible catalysis occurs, and emergent phenomena are now capable of manifesting.

This phenomena might emerge through security breaches, social and cultural developments, or "novel" (i.e. unintended) uses for the system.

At this point, the system - the platform or app or "digital product" - is "out of the control". The creators enter the system as participants along with the users - and can only resort to observing for emergent phenomena and adapting the system to it. This cycle of emergence and adaptation will persist for the system's life as a complex entity.

"The definition of infrastructure is often uselessly broad and abstract: One early 19th-century definition was “the installations that form the basis for any operation or system.” But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale."

Some cognitive theories define culture as a distributed cooperative substrate, and an essential component of "cognition in the wild".

The book "The Secret of Our Success" which establishes that "culture" is that secret ingredient, presents numerous anecdotes to support its thesis. One of these is in the extraordinary hardship that Western colonial explorers faced when arriving on strange lands. Despite their apparently excellent skills, intelligence, and physical shape, they nonetheless struggled to survive.

The book reasons that raw intelligence isn't enough - and what they lacked was the relevant cultural knowledge that had evolved amongst the local inhabitants of that region over centuries or milenia.

Today it's clear that we are facing a similar crisis as more of civilization's coordination and communication systems are remade through the internet and digital technologies. Over time, new cultural norms will emerge to help us with foreign demands like attention management, but for the time being we find ourselves mostly afloat, with this knowledge either non-existent, only partially effective, or localized and so far poorly disseminated.

While technology companies aren't incentivized to guide the formation of "positive" or "healthy" cultures, I'd argue that they are largely oblivious to it. Without a vocabulary to describe it, or processes to help seed it, they will continue to blindly shape it through unsophisticated product development decisions.