Matthew Frederick in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (The MIT Press, 2007) after saying how to draw a line, also says that there are three levels of knowing:
-simplicity, is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.
-complexity, characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex system in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifyng patterns and connection.
-informed simplicity, is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to dicern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures.

Reviewing the book “Shaping Things”, written by Bruce Sterling, John Thackara states: “Our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than [...]

In the 100 pages of first chapter of Umberto Eco new book From the tree to the labyrinth (Dall’albero al labirinto. Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione, Bompiani, nov 2007), Eco writes about semiotic dictionary and encyclopaedia and discusses – trough diagram and charts – the problem of definition and classification. I found it very thought-provoking and it remember me the Nietzsche quote that I tell to my students when I want to point out they have to incorporate indeterminacy when working as designers:

Icona, Indice e Simbolo non sono solo “tre tipi di segni”. Sono innanzitutto tre modalità semiosiche. La semiosi, il passaggio dall’Oggetto Dinamico alla Rappresentazione segnica, e da qui all’Interpretante, è un processo (ad esempio di trasformazione, di traduzione, di correlazione e di stabilizzazione delle correlazioni, ecc.) e tale processo è appunto caratterizzato da tre modalità:

After four years, the time is ripe to reveal the precise meaning of (half of) the title of our research framework (and of this blog): “Density”. I have to admit that at the beginning the choice of this term – and the idea of researching on that – was more like the verbal synthesis of [...]

RESHAPING COMMUNICATION DESIGN TOOLS
During the last thirty years the level of interest in Complexity Science has been constantly increasing. Combining the opportunity offered by the findings of the Complexity Science with the framework of the multi-disciplinary debate on the meaning and use of diagrams, we propose a design methodology to help designers support their interventions in complex environments.

Who should attend? The ID Design Research Conference will be an ideal venue for design and consumer researchers, planners, marketing and branding strategists, and other managers and executives concerned with learning the latest advanced methods and approaches to design practice. The conference will emphasize the importance industry and academia share in generating value and advancing [...]

The Indo-European Family of Languages, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

This diagram from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a delightful family tree of Indo-European languages, but it does not explain the complexity of the language evolution and his hystory.

According to one definition1, engineering is making things based on scientific principles – as opposed to the intuitive making that defines a craft. Information visualization (InfoVis) is practiced like a craft today, based mostly on practical examples, but not on theoretical basics. Here is a sketch of not only InfoVis as an engineering field, but [...]

Jeff Conklin nicely summarises wicked problems as follows: You don’t understand the problem until you have developed a solution. Indeed, there is no definitive statement of “The Problem.” The problem is ill-structured, an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints. Rittel said, “One cannot understand the problem with knowing about its context; one cannot meaningfully [...]