Adaptive Design Presentation

Here's the .ppt I presented at the AIGA Experience Design forum at the Design Council, London t'other night, around the subject of Adaptive Design. Though it's hardly rocket science - merely an introduction to the general area of adaptation, linked to some recent memes - I was pleasantly surprised by the response. Many good questions (which I barely began to answer) and some good thoughts fizzing around the room by the end of the evening.

Towards Designing For Adaptation (.ppt) (1.1mb)

I'm worried that the slides won't mean much without my accompanying speech (even then!), so I've transferred my scribbled 'script' into the presentation. For those of you with access to Powerpoint, you'll be able to read my rough notes accompanying the slides by going into 'Notes page' via the View menu.

I do aim to write up something more coherent, and hopefully a little more meaningful (no point in setting the bar too low ;) around these ideas soon (perhaps it'll provide a good excuse with which to escape from the family at Christmas).

Additionally, here's a bunch of links I used to research the talk, where possible relating to sections in the presentation. Not complete, but a start:

Background/Scope/Definition
Tom Moran's Everyday Adaptive Design presentation at DIS2002 (.ppt)
My notes on above
Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn
Steven Johnson's Emergence
Norman Potter's What Is A Designer

Examples of Adaptive Design
BBCi Homepage
Freegorifero.com on above
Blackbeltjones.com ditto
v-2 ditto
Games
The Sims
GTA
OS
Symbian

Themes
Layers of change
Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn
Peter Merholz on similarity to JJG's elements
Peter Morville has adapted similar Brand ideas to IA
Fabio Sergio IA quote, which can be related to layers
Imperfection
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Suboptimal
Matt Jones on suboptimal
Mark Pilgrim on RSS 2.0
Tom Coates on suboptimal
Clay Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems
Cascading Recombinance
Space to Evolve
v2: Make room, make room!
New Rationalism
my notes on New Rationalism

Inspiration
JC Herz: Gaming and the Art of Innovation
Neil Gershenfeld
Gershenfeld: Emergent Engineering
Janine Benyus: Innovations Inspired By Nature

In the discussion after, I was pointed to a piece called "Worse Is Better" by Richard Gabriel - a key programming-oriented essay on the design of what we'd now call 'suboptimal' systems. Yet to read, but looks extremely relevant.

Since the talk, I got round to reading Adam Greenfield's excellent interview with Nathan Shedroff. I thought Adam's conclusion as to where 'our discipline' needs to go was relevant here:

"(It ideally) allows for human variability, admits to open-endedness, and never falls into the trap of suggesting that even after we've done everything we can as designers, people aren't going to do with our designs precisely what they will."

v-2: Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview (part two of two)

I also briefly mentioned my bumbling reference to "cascading recombinance" to the phrase's originator, Matt Webb. He pointed out the similarity to another quotation I'd mentioned, Janine Benyus' "life creates conditions conducive to life, in everything that it does".