There’s Always a Joke, Right?
What is the Center for Complexity and why is it housed in an art school?
This is Compass & Lens, a newsletter from the Center for Complexity. You are getting this newsletter because you subscribed, you are a member of the RISD community, or you signed up for updates from us during one of our symposiums or events.
The Center for Complexity has been operating since 2018 at Rhode Island School of Design. We are a small team. As a project-based research unit at RISD, we work on human-built systems with organizations, institutions, and communities to achieve positive social impact. We are bringing the tools of art and design to bear on systems practice. Whenever we introduce ourselves, we get a lot of questions about our name.
In May 2022, Marisa Brown joined the Center for Complexity team as our new Associate Director. She sat down with Founding Director Justin W. Cook to talk a bit about the team’s work and why we use “complexity” in the first place.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
MB: My first question was really circling around the word and idea behind “complexity.” I’m interested to hear how you define it and even how those definitions have changed over time since the Center was named in 2018 — but I think maybe first, could we start with this: How do people respond to this word? What do they bring to the word, and to the idea of complexity?
JWC: There's always an initial defensive mechanism. There's always a joke, right? Like, “The last thing the world needs is more complexity,” or “I don't need more complexity,” or “If I could do what you're doing, I'd call it the Center for Simplicity.” There’s a desire to resist and avoid that term, although I have to say that that has been steadily decreasing over time. I think COVID has shown us how interconnected the world is. So explaining to people that the world is, in fact, complex is much easier now.
I think that the distinction that we make in our work is to argue for more complexity as part of process, not necessarily for more complex outcomes. And so that's the “Why RISD?” argument. Artists and designers, by training and by disposition, are interested in complexity as part of their creative process. They probably wouldn't use those terms, but if you look at their work, at the kind of detritus that's left behind the work…if you go into the Metcalf Building right now to the Sculpture floor – it’s packed with stuff, right? That space started empty and now it's full. And most of that's not going to be the outcome of their work. It's the detritus of their work. I would argue that that is a kind of evidence of navigating complexity through their process.
MB: So that's another question. Why is it that maybe for artists and designers, complexity is already something that they're thinking about and doing in their practice? What would it be like if this Center was housed in a neuroscience institute or a public policy school or a business school? How does it change the work of this Center — and also how does it change the work of RISD — to be housed within an art and design school?
JWC: Yeah, that's a good question. If I look at other organizations that are saying things that are similar to us, or talking about complexity in some form, I think it tends to be more in that Santa Fe Institute tradition of complexity theory, and I think the balance tends toward the theoretical, whereas RISD is very much a practice-based institution.
MB: What kind of work is the Santa Fe Institute doing? I'm not familiar with them.
JWC: Looking at complex systems with mathematical models — a lot of people at Santa Fe are doing that. Analysis, refining theoretical models that represent some world system, or a component of a world system. There's a group that I'm a part of that is a federal government complexity community, and they're looking at how complexity theory and the models that they can generate can help manage innovation with an aim to better predict battlefield outcomes — those sorts of things. And I would say it's more of a model-based practice, in the tradition of an economics approach to systems, whereas here we're trying to intervene in systems, using the recognition of complexity as the entry point for analysis, for intervention for partnership, or for any number of things.
MB: Is there also a difference in attention to public good or justice or social justice? Do you think there's a difference between the kind of work they are doing and the kind of work this Center is doing in that way?
JWC: On the one hand, I want to be agnostic to the moral dimension of the work, and on the other hand, I'm interested in social wellbeing, helping people thrive, and social justice and equity. Because those also are elements of describing how complex the world is.
Maybe it’s an outcome versus process thing. I am a bit wary of foregrounding social impact or a sense of right or wrong in our process. Instead it’s trying to align practice with the truest nature of the problem as we can understand it, recognizing our positionality and subjectivity. But our projects are oriented toward outcomes like getting us through this very difficult moment in human history to hopefully something better. That's a very pro-social pro-democratic objective.
MB: I feel like in some of what you said, especially thinking about binaries and pressure on these systems, like there's a sense that this time is unique or there's a unique need for a center for complexity now. Do you feel like that's the case, or has there been a need for a center for complexity throughout the course of the last two hundred years?
JWC: My feeling is that we bumped up against the limits of ways of understanding the world that helped us thrive up through the 20th century, and that those older ideas that have their origins in the Enlightenment are becoming frail — it's not that they're falling away or dying, but they're in need of reinvigoration.
MB: But do you feel like they're in need of reinvigoration or…in some ways that's a question about systems: Do you feel like they always tend towards the bad, or are they neutral?
JWC: One of the slides that I often show when I'm talking about this is about life expectancy for women.
MB: Yeah, I saw that. I just saw that presentation.
JWC: That's remarkable, right? From 1840, when life expectancy was 45 years, and now it's almost 90. So these are powerful tools. So that's why this is not a “tear it all down” argument, but it's recognizing how a Newtonian, mechanistic view is not very good at dealing with complexity. So it's a question of marrying up, right? We can do our projects because of our partnerships with experts. It's not us out there trying to do these things by ourselves. Because we recognize that our colleagues in the nuclear field for instance, have really important knowledge derived from that mechanistic world view.
So I think the evidence points to valuing these traditional ways of knowing: things like lifespan and generally lower rates of poverty — although, the flip side is all kinds of problems around inequality.
Of course, climate is the biggest challenge that is a result or a symptom of these ways of knowing. The question is how to update or rework institutions and epistemologies in order to deal with this moment where these very successful ideas seem to be causing more damage than good.
MB: How much of what can go wrong with systems — how much of that is actually a diversity problem? How much of that problem is who's at the table and who's been defining the problems and the solutions?
JWC: I think all of our projects have at their core a belief and a design that is a product of the notion of transdisciplinarity, which is where you have people that have expert knowledge working alongside those with lived experience to try to understand the problem space better and develop solutions that are more fit for purpose, based on a more holistic understanding. Certainly that's true in our opioids work. I think it will be true with Horizon 2045, although it's harder there, it will take more time to do that. Our studio model — our core mechanism of engagement — we try to make them as diverse as possible given the constraints. In the equitable futures studio that we ran last summer — people from across the spectrum were involved, including people with lived experience. These are very flat, purposefully created environments so that people can be themselves and bring their ideas and their ways of understanding this issue into that space. It's fairly rare that that kind of thing happens and we could do so much more if we had more resources.
If you think complexity is important, then diversity must be a primary objective. By not having a diverse group of people involved in a project, you guarantee an anti-complexity frame of understanding. So yeah, diversity is one way to put complexity into practice.
Field Notes
CfC Symposium Call for Proposals. We are announcing the theme for our 2022 Symposium: Signs of Collapse. To begin, we’re issuing a call for proposals open to RISD faculty and staff and due June 20. For everyone else, there will be more opportunities to participate. Stay tuned.
DRS 2022. Members of Mainstay RI will be hosting a conversation at the Design Research Society conference in Bilbao called A Marriage in Practice: The Role of Design Research in the World of Medical Science. June 25 - July 3, 2022.
Why RISD students are designing spaces for people to safely do drugs. Over the spring semester, six students from Interior Architecture and Industrial Design participated in Design Beyond Crisis, a CfC studio course looking at the design of harm reduction centers in Rhode Island. Their work was featured in Fast Company.
Horizon 2045: Imagining a Nuclear Weapons-Free Future. An interview with Isabelle Williams — one of our partners on the Horizon 2045 project — describing the aims and approach.
Worth Reading
Who's Invading Whom? An essay about the (war) metaphors used in public health and how they lead thinking astray. It deals in epistemological errors and some surprising mental models. It is wide ranging, covering smoking and public health, Zika and plastics, risk and the Anthropocene.
Lara Penin invites us to revisit Gui Bonsiepe. This edited volume published in April 2022 gathers a selection of Bonsiepe's writings, including a reflective interview and interpretive essays from contemporary design scholars. This text surveys over 60 years of design practice, with specific care on the issues of the "center" and the "margins" that have a revived significance as we confront justice and equity in our field.
Interesting Links
Conference: Frontiers of Democracy at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, on "Civic Cases." From the organizers: “Civic cases describe difficult choices faced by real groups of activists, social-movement participants, or colleagues in nonprofit organizations. By discussing what we would do in similar situations, we can develop civic skills, explore general issues, and form or strengthen relationships with other activists and thinkers.” June 24, 2022 live in Boston or online.
Call for papers: special themed issue of ENGAGE! titled Exodus and Entry: The Challenges and Promises of Refugee and Immigrant Supports. Submission deadline: July 1, 2022.
Call for papers: special themed issue of Metropolitan Universities Journal titled The Pedagogy of Place-Based Initiatives and Anchor Institutions on pedagogies of community-engaged teaching and learning. Submission deadline: September 1, 2022.