Relational complexity

Understanding relational complexity.

The world is full of different puzzle pieces, and they all carry different relations to one another, understanding this can help you to understand why systems flow in the way that they do.

Relational complexity is something that has been on my mind a lot lately, in part because I think the way we relate to things and the relationships that we hold is an interesting lens to look through when trying to understand the behavioural actions that communities gravitate towards when in a group setting.

Relationships offer an interesting metaphor for the way we think about how we interact with the world around us. My thinking about relationships has been triggered by my interest in community, ecology, and the dynamics which surround community development. Particularly how do you design for community and what does it even mean to design for community?

The notion of complexity is surfaced in my thinking, because I fundamentally think that in order to make things simple and relatable they need to be complex. Many will disagree with me and one day I will (soon I hope) open this up for discussion and for my thesis to be critiqued from various points of view.

In the world that we live in, it is easy to look straight past relation to the great whole in certain situations. Are we more interested in learning/understanding how the parts of the environment that we are in fit together or are we more interested in the experience of the now?

Deep down we value intimacy over immediacy.

Yet, social media and the digital age has trained us to optimise our behaviour for the later. Always on, immediacy and temporary exchanges. The short-term targets all influence the way that we think about relationships. The longer-term value or motive behind the interconnectedness of it all gets obscured by the design of the interfaces that we navigate the digital environment through.

By zooming out and asking questions we learn to train our minds to pay attention to this complexity. To approach the world from different angles and to look at things differently, depending on the approach we are taking in the moment.

By embracing diversity, we can engage our minds to pay attention to relational complexity. Engaging our relational understanding and asking the big question of what this all really means. Simultaneously, being a tourist and a purist. Share the code, open the doors.