Due to the large number of dependencies, interconnected infrastructure and the planetary scale of technology systems, any digital system must be evaluated as Pre or Post-Threshold. That is, the threshold when these software systems exhibit the behaviors that define “complex systems”.

This is not necessarily an absolute. More or less of the total surface area of a software system may ebb and flow within or beyond the Threshold, at different times.

As more of the system breaches this Threshold, the less predictable and more uncontrollable it becomes.

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.