community is more able to weather a storm, a bad growing season, a financial hardship, or a cultural crisis. Companies with diverse resources have more tools to respond to market challenges, customer whims, or corporate missions.
The problem with diversity is that it’s often not valued in society. Consider how many varieties of apples (~7500) or rice (~80,000) have evolved. Before humans, these varieties helped all of nature (plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, monera, and so on) respond to often hazardous changes in the environment due to weather, tectonic events, or those from space. Today, however, human societies have reduced the number of varieties of almost everything natural to just a few. The vast majority of the U.S. agriculture system, for example, is built on five to six varieties of apples, three to four types of cherries, and fewer than 20 types of grains—often without even preserving discarded varieties in case we need them in the future. It may seem like good business from a financial perspective (fewer options to choose between), but it’s very bad business if you want a resilient marketplace. Your design solutions and processes will have an impact on resiliency and diversity, and you should consider if that impact is positive or negative.
Resiliency is often missed when evaluating our markets, environments, or systems. Because it’s abstract, we focus on lower-level issues that contribute to overall resiliency, but often don’t address the challenges we face. For example, in trying to solve poverty, we often focus on the symptoms and not the cause. In our fervor, we rush to simple solutions that are standardized because they are easier. We also look for quick fixes to satisfy the urgency we feel. But poverty is not an easy problem to solve. To be effective, poverty needs diverse solutions across the entire system (and often with a long time to take hold). If you want your time and energy to be truly effective, your design solutions will also need to reflect how they contribute to sustainable, lasting, systemic change—not merely the most visible symptoms.
Community resiliency is achieved through a wide spectrum of issues: financial stability and opportunity, diverse education, reliable safety and security, values embedded in systems and markets, and so on. We can’t, for example, ever expect to be safe from terrorism simply by installing alarms and cameras everywhere. Terrorism isn’t the product of anything that can be watched by a camera or triggered by an alarm. Yet, these easy solutions are the ones we jump at, and they provide temporary emotional peace—until they fail. Periodically, you should evaluate whether you’re truly working on a solution at the right level to make the change intended. Often, our projects are defined in terms and at levels that are more easily grasped by organizational functions but aren’t pushing at the pressure points that are needed to make change. Your system perspective is what will guide you to understanding the network of interactions that challenge your customers and clients to determine whether the solution is even capable of affecting the kind of change desired.
Periodically, you should evaluate whether you’re truly working on a solution at the right level to make the change intended.
Centralization and Decentralization
While it’s often easier to manage a few, centralized systems, these are often less sustainable solutions because, though strong, when they fail, the rest of the system fails with them. This is why a tree falling on a power line in Washington state can trigger a power outage over most of the Western United States. Centralization was the management approach that governed society and culture throughout much of human history (certainly Western history) and was responsible for creating the Industrial Age when it was applied to production. Everything from central banking to centralized power plants to large corporations with central management to centralized distribution systems to centralized education to the “hub and spoke” air transportation model reflects the thinking that centralization is best. And, from a purely management perspective, it often is. But just because it has been popular doesn’t make it the best approach.
Centralization is not without serious faults. Centralized decision-making often doesn’t reflect local expertise, knowledge, or understanding. Centralized distribution, combined with the standardization necessary with economies of scale often reduces choice, favoring quantity over variety. Centralized power (such as a coal-powered electricity plant) often produces power more efficiently that must be transmitted over greater distances (which reduces efficiency) and can reduce pollution in some communities but instead concentrate it in others. In addition, centralized power is often less resilient since fewer, larger power plants are vastly more vulnerable to accidents, outages, and attacks than many, smaller ones distributed throughout the service area.
It is because of the negative impacts on diversity and resiliency that centralization is often less sustainable. Decentralized systems for everything from manufacturing to distribution to energy generation to political rule tend to be more sustainable. Consider how unresponsive centralized government often is for local issues. Or consider how much more resilient a community’s power grid would be if it had a mix of energy inputs (especially if these were renewable) spread across a power network, available locally where it is used. Natural gas turbines, geothermal and hydrothermal generation, co-generation (creating energy from waste), solar, wind, and so on can all exist easily within most communities without adverse health risks or other community concerns. Where possible, generating power where it is used has always been an efficient solution (mills have been situated next to rivers that could provide water power for centuries). However, organizations (whether corporations, NGOs, or governments) that thrive because of their centralized control are often the most vocal opponents to decentralized solutions because their advantage is threatened, despite the beneficial aspects these solutions may have for everyone else.
It is because of the negative impacts on diversity and resiliency that centralization is often less sustainable. Decentralized systems for everything from manufacturing to distribution to energy generation to political rule tend to be more sustainable.
To be sure, decentralization itself also has problems. Chief among them are standardization and communication. While decentralization can increase resiliency (and often equitable opportunity), it requires standards and increased communication in order to function. The benefits, however, are often increased efficiency in management, more resilient operation in failure, and more innovated techniques in solutions generated. For example, it’s often easy for local communities to establish their own standards that may not be consistent, fair, or interoperable in a larger context. This was largely the case with every developing technology, from screw sizes to electricity current to railroad track gauges to education standards to laws to money. Decentralized solutions are often problematic at their onset (this is especially the case with new technologies) until standards are established. Progress is often retarded as competing solutions compete on low-level features and performance, that is until standards are established cooperatively or competitively. For example, consider software file formats. Until a standard was established for interchanging files and communicating with other equipment, say PostScript, applications couldn’t universally talk to printers, typesetters, or other equipment. It wasn’t practical to even work on advanced applications like page layout applications, image editing applications, or content management systems until these standards were established, despite the fact that they were envisioned long before they were able to be implemented.
Designers need to be aware of how their solutions inhibit or reinforce centralization—and be ready to defend why and whether their solutions are improvements and for whom these improvements benefit.
Cooperation and Competition
Competition, while a powerful motivator in innovation, is not the only ingredient needed for successful, sophisticated solutions. Despite how we characterize innovation and design, nothing is created in a vacuum, and no solution is successful without cooperation between people, including design teams, partners, supply chains, and customers.
Competition, while a
