Molecular We
Posted on December 4, 2017
Is it possible to understand the complexity and uncertainty of our life and this society by analyzing them with stock-and-flow models?
1
3 days ago, a girl asked me about my studies at Pratt Institute. I knew this girl when I was in college. She was my junior schoolmate and one of the best students in her class. Recently, she has been working hard in applying to both domestic and overseas graduate programs.
“I am studying at Parsons,” I texted in the message box, “but if you want to know something about the industrial design program in Pratt, I can tell you what I know based on the research I did before.”
I can always see the shadow of myself in this girl. We both used to be the top student of the industrial design program, both had the experience of studying abroad and both took a year off after graduated from college……before this conversation, I really had thought we were similar.
To be more specific, before she told me the main reason she wants to go to graduate school is that she doesn’t want to work now. And the things she cares the most about is the study load and how to get a high GPA. I didn’t know how to respond, though I was so familiar with this mindset for this was exactly what I thought one year ago before I stepped into society. After having changed jobs three times and met many people from different backgrounds, I am no longer that college girl. I really wanted to tell this girl, who has never been out of school about a lot of things: knowing an industry well before jumping into it, planning your life with a long-term view, thinking independently but not blindly following others’ steps, etc.
However I hesitated, typed some words and deleted them all. I know not a single person is able to plan or, to design their own life. We are all living in a giant system and can only receive information from a relative local scale, which is always far from enough. Donella Meadows’s book Thinking in Systems is really inspiring and the stock-and-flow system theory has intrigued me a lot. I decided to use this theory to map and explain how our human society works from both a larger, holistic view and micro, individual view.
2
Imagine our society as a giant, complex system consisting of numerous tanks, pipes and valves – they are the infrastructure. Tanks are connected with each other by pipes, and valves are installed on the pipes to control water flow. There is a lot of water within this system, in tanks or pipes, static or dynamic.
Water, the collection of countless H2O molecules, represents human flow in society. A tank combined with the water in it becomes a stock, which refers to a certain social organization, like a school or a company. It can also be a social position, like infants, students and workers. Pipes represent the accesses and transfers between those stocks. Taps show the control and resistance between different stocks. Tanks, pipes and valves are of different sizes and shapes, actually they are in constant changes. For example, the size of the tank “students in Transdisciplinary Design Program” is changing every year. The size of the whole social system is expanding constantly, which represents the growing number of humans who exist on this planet.
Let’s observe this system from a micro scale, like from a single H2O molecule’s view, and we can see how an individual person’s experience looks in this system. Yes, we are just as small a particle that can’t even be seen from the global scale. Our lives are the locus within the system: beginning from the tank “new birth”, ending up in the tank “death” and going through many different tanks. We receive information from a relative local scale, and sometimes, pushed by other molecules around us, we move from one tank to another through pipes.
What makes our life so uncertain is our limited perception of the whole system. Small as a molecule, we can only gather information from a relative local scale and make decisions – sometimes quite important ones – based on this limited information. Though today’s world is much access than many decades ago, our visions are still not able to see a lot of things. For instance, the future, perspectives from other people and many factors that influence your interests. Timing is another factor that makes the whole system messy. We will never know when we meet a person that we will fall in love with; when our dream companies will offer us positions. In many cases, we can only determine which direction we would like to go, but we don’t have the force to turn the tap. Our information on who is turning the tap and who else is competing with us is all scarce. To sum up, the ability of entering a flow or a stock is highly uncertain.
In the world of uncertainty, the borders between right and wrong, good and bad become blurred. You have no idea if a decision in a certain context will lead you to the way you are dreaming for. Sometimes, or many times, people will be in the same stock with totally different reasons and paths. Some of them are there because of sophisticated planning, countless sleepless nights and hard decisions, while some probably don’t plan much and they used their energy to do other things instead of thinking and planning. In many cases, some people can jump several steps to a certain stock simply because they owns more resources, but all these people may end up in the same stock!
3
After seeing the second part of this article, I was shocked by the permeating negative thoughts within those words, and I realized that I should not be that negative.
Are we really that powerless that even can’t determine our lives?
Then I figured out that there are several notable flaws in this metaphor. First, basically all the tanks, pipes and taps are also created by human beings. Other than just flowing in the system, we are also creating the system. Second, the distinguished difference between each individual matters. The water is actually not water, but the mixture of different types of molecules. Everyone has their own value system, own ambitions and own source of happiness, so I shouldn’t have homogenized them.
What happens in the micro scale is actually a confrontation between individual’s power and the resistance of the whole social system. Small as a molecule, we still can determine the direction we want to go and put our efforts to propel ourselves, and even create our own stocks to facilitate others.
4
Another faulty assumption I made in the second part is, all uncertainties are bad. However, sometimes uncertainties are so beautiful. Like the fundamental reason of why at this moment I am typing this blog post: the story of why I am in this program. I misunderstood Transdisciplinary Design as something related to Industrial design and applied to this program. When I realized it, I understood that it was such a lucky mistake for at that moment, which was 4 months after the application, I had become aware of the fact that I didn’t want to study industrial design again in graduate school. Probably this is the best stupid thing I have ever done.
And sometimes, uncertainty means spacious.
5
Back to the conversation between me and the girl. I didn’t know how to express a lot of things to her because I didn’t know how they would or would not influence her life in a good or bad way. Also because I realized after knowing these things, one would suffer a lot, and I didn’t know if their suffering would lead her to a brighter future.
However, I felt it’s my duty to offer the information to her, the neutral information without my attitude. So I typed, “This was my experience in three industrial design companies……”, Then I described what I saw and felt during my gap year and told her they were all my personal feelings, and that she should make her own choice and decisions based on what she considers correct and enjoy what happens.
“Anyway,” I ended the conversation, “Good luck and enjoy the coming journey.”
— Tina Qi