Shifting from Programmed to Adaptive Systems
A little framework to help thinking and talking about the transition from „controlling the orchestra“ to „orchestrating possibilities“.
In a recent interaction design course I was teaching with a dozen of wonderful students, we discussed what roles we play as designers if instead of dealing with determined and predefined structures, we rather need to handle probability and constantly evolving conditions. How we might move away from „planning and controlling circumstances“ to adapting to preference, situation and context „just in time“.
We explored the Deterministic → Probabilistic axis by creating examples that make this theoretic concept more tangible. This resulted in prototypes for mobile education companion apps that instead of materializing complex structures into extensive systems with a lot of friction points (like such educational management tools often feel today) focused more on understanding context, learning traits and behaviors to provide relevant information and options for action as needed.
I had the feeling there was something missing to fully grasp this paradigm shift, so I added the Controlled → Resilient axis, extending it to a little framework with four quadrants in between: Programmed as where we‘re coming from, Managed and Engineered as transitional states on the route to Adaptive.
I think it’s quite self-explanatory and I‘d like to leave it to you to apply or adapt (sic!) it to your thinking or practice. Please let me know how this resonates with you. Feel free to feed it to your favorite LLM and prompt it to apply the framework to different fields — it’s fun!
As a metaphor borrowed from music, I like the idea of emerging from a conducted orchestra to an improvised jazz session — where orchestration still plays an essential role, but rather as an agreed framework of meaningful rules instead of a predefined score.
„Orchestrating possibilities“ instead of „controlling the orchestra“.
Let me know if you’re interested in having a session around the topic with your team or class. I promise to bring music.
