Ant designers.
Posted on December 3, 2011 | posted by:
Photo Credit : Wassim Maouad
On that December morning in Tunisia, it was still sunny and warm when street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was found at an intersection, after dousing himself with gasoline, engulfed in flames as he cried in despair, “How do you expect me to make a living?”. Large protests in Tunis followed soon thereafter.
January is not very cold in Egypt, at least not cold enough to stop the hordes of young Egyptians from walking down the legendary Tahrir Square as they chant: “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām” (the people want to bring down the regime).
May is a warm month in Spain. It was also the month when all the unemployed, the poorly paid, the subcontractors, the precarious, and the young decided to join forces and gather under the “we are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers” banners.
Defying the cold and rainy days of November in New York, hundreds of students gathered in Union Square shouting in harmony, “we are the 99%!” As they held hands, they walked down from Broadway to the Brooklyn Bridge while their amplified chants filled the condensed city with an odd breath of fresh air.
Those four scenes are the fruit of spontaneous reactions of individuals, brought together by common misery, captured by the media, then made legendary – or what we, designers, like to describe as Emergent Behaviors. The events taking place are not orchestrated by hierarchical structures. Instead, they are prompted from the bottom up, where every individual’s decision suddenly made more sense as part of a larger group.
In his book “Emergence, The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software”, Steven Johnson explains the theory of emergence by referring to two main examples: the slime mold ―an organism that self organizes with no command from a pacemaker― and ant colonies. In fact, in an ant colony, the queen is a myth, as she doesn’t give orders nor does she coordinate in any way the behavior of the working ants. The laborers, thanks to a rather simple yet genius pheromone recognition system, leave trails to each other in a way that allows each individual ant to assess the needs of the colony by literally sensing its daily encounters with fellow workers. For instance, an individual ant expects to stumble upon three forager ants per minute. If she encounters more for several consecutive minutes, she will automatically join the nest building team to compensate. In other words “local interactions can lead to global problem solving” (Johnson, 2002, p.77).
Although protestors rely on signs other than pheromone trails, the similarities between our five stories remain striking: all of them are impulsive and unorganized gatherings of people with strong motives, deciding to join forces with others who share similar grounds. No pacemaker, no orchestra leader, just individual behavior mounted up in one united motion. Each one of those protests is an emergent behavior on its own and in its own geography. However, zooming out a little bit more reveals a pattern on a global scale. Indeed, media coverage, social networking websites, and the facilitated data communication platforms have played the role of pheromone trails, transforming planet earth into a small ant colony. People all across the globe have decided to acknowledge their daily encounters (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and join forces with them, creating a global planetary protest.
As we begin to conceive that we can exist in a world with no pacemaker, where people are capable of self-organizing thanks to advanced technology and communication, one begins to wonder: What happens to the current hierarchical structure that we all know and rely on? Does it fall apart or do the parts reorganize in different configurations? Most importantly (and as a selfish person I must ask) what happens to designers? Do they become obsolete and useless in an emergent structure, or do they morph into a new body?
According to Herbert Simon, design is an “action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”. Just by looking around us we can easily assess that the existing situation today is one of great change and transformation. It is a pivotal transitional phase that we all hope will lead to better living conditions. People have impulsively joined forces to, in fact, shift to a preferred situation. They have somehow become one big “designer” in their attempt to take control of shaping their future. So where does this leave us, designers, today? Since people seem to have everything in good control, maybe all we need to do is facilitate tasks, help spread the pheromones.
As designers, we should take off our mundane working hats and try to find a better-suited position for ourselves in this great era of change. We should be part of the bottom level, when we speak about bottom up, trying to induce some change as we go up. Transforming into ants might be a solution, as we would have to rely on our instinct and daily encounters hoping that we can deduce a pattern and shift our behaviors accordingly.
One last thing we should definitely try to do at all times, in rain or in sunshine, from January to December, is make sure Bouazizi’s cries are not gone to waste, or Tahrir Square chants are not left unheard, or the urges of students and unemployed citizens are not silenced. Designers/ants, let’s get to work!