Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and
radically contingent white water world.
Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the
twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water
world--rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These
are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of
complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the
world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about
designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its
material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems.
In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often
elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to
design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through
theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that
range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even
societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of
domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema,
music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five
books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of
books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to
people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and
intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points
allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of
books.