Last weekend I attended and presented at the Design Exchange (DX) annual conference called OurTopias-Ideal Cities and the Roles of Design in Remaking Urban Space.
Designers are one of the most creative professionals in the world, yet many presenters bemoaned the fact that most designers are not good systems thinkers-a topic that is not normally taught at design schools. (N.B. likewise, smart technologies is still too new a discipline , and is only informally mentioned and covered as an afterthought by some issue champions.) All to often, designers and their clients only think in linear, overly simplistic, cause and effect terms, which is not representative of complex adaptive systems such as a biological or environmental ecosystems. We know that actions at one level of a system can have unintended consequenes and impacts at a different level and over time.
Two tools are available for designers to use that can be borrowed from business school.
VSM
One is Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Modeling, VSM-which I've cited many times in this blog and teach in a two day workshop on Systems Thinking.
System Dynamics Modeling
The other tool is system dynamics modeling, which was first developed by Jay Forrester at MIT over 40 years ago.
Two recent updates: SWARM & RePost 2.0
Swarm (Swarm Development Group, 2003) is a software package for the multi-agent simulation of complex systems, originally developed at the Santa Fe Institute. Developed as a research tool for a variety of disciplines, Swarm is a simulation system using collections of concurrently interacting agents. Researchers have used Swarm to implement a large variety of agent-based models. The Swarm Development Group (SDG), a not-for-profit organization, supports the development of the Swarm Simulation System and its use by a community of researchers. Swarm is freely distributed for use under public license as a set of libraries that facilitate implementation of agent-based models.
The conceptual basis of Swarm comes from the field of Artificial Life. Artificial Life is a branch of artificial intelligence that studies biological systems and, through abstract modeling of biological mechanisms such as adaptation, identifies dynamic characteristics that become the basis of artificial modeling. Since the task of engineering a multi-agent simulation system is beyond the capability of most scientific researchers, the Swarm project was initiated in 1994 at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
RePast 2.0
RePast 2.0 (REcursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit) (University of Chicago: Social Science Research Computing, 2002) is another swarm-like agent-based simulation and modeling tool. RePast is a software framework for creating agent-based simulations using the Java language. It provides a library of classes for creating, running, displaying, and collecting data from an agent-based simulation. RePast envisions a simulation as a state machine whose state is constituted by the collective states of all its components. These components can be divided up into infrastructure and representation. The infrastructure is the various mechanisms that run the simulation, display and collect data and so forth. The representation is what the simulation modeler constructs, the simulation model itself. The state of the infrastructure is then the state of the display, the state of the data collection objects etc. The state of the representation is the state of what is being modeled, the current values of all the agents' variables, the current value of the space or spaces in which they operate, as well as the state of any other representation objects (e.g. aggregate quasi-independent "institution" objects). The history of the simulation as a software phenomenon is the history of both these states, while the history of the simulation as a simulation is the history of the representational states (Universityof Chicago: Social Science Research Computing, 2002). Similar to Swarm, RePast allows a user to build a simulation as a state machine in which all the changes to the state machine occur through a schedule. RePast moves beyond the representation of agents as discrete, self-contained entities in viewing agents as social actors who are “permeable, interleaved and mutually defining, with cascading and recombinant motives. Repast supports the modeling of belief systems, agents, organizations and institutions as recursive social constructions” (University of Chicago: Social Science Research Computing, 2002). RePast is therefore more applicable to the modeling of social networks and interactions that are commonly found in business and management environments and particularly in the semantics of causal mapping. Simulation support for network topologies is an important distinguishing feature between RePast and Swarm. In Swarm environmental topologies are represented as a two- or three-dimensional grid or torus,3 which is a natural way to view biological or ecological systems. Social science environments, including business management applications, are more naturally represented through network topologies, making RePast the logical choice to implement causal maps (given the node/link semantics of the method.)
Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©
Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "
The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!
To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here
To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together
- ".....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"-old Japanese proverb
- ".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones
- ".......Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought." --A. Einstein
- ".......Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are surefire showstoppers..." --Walter Derzko
- ".......Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead
- ".......Small minds discuss people; Average minds discuss events; Great minds discuss ideas; --Anon
P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page
This site contains a very good information, and here is another similar Article
which is having related information,for more log on to
Organization Design
Posted by: kittu | June 19, 2007 at 07:38 AM