One of my strengths as a designer is as a sense maker. I’m able to present complicated subjects in an understandable and interrelated way. Below I have presented my foils on the subject of complexity of a talk I recently gave to a room of about 100 developers, designers and business developers. The talk taught strategies for handling any kind of complexity, by arguing that we needed to make compound system out of thing that were convoluted. Please click through the images and their description to find out more.

Bendy complexity

Comlexity hides it’s word roots in a latin veneer, but simply means “bendy”. A good english translation would be “involved”.

Manifold

… or we could translate complex as “manifold.” The flat rug is visible, and open. While the manifold mat hides parts of it’s pattern, and requires straightening out, or investigation to uncover it’s i hidden secrets.

Entagled

Text: “Entagled: Excuse me, is this your code?” Some issues are complicated beyond ny hope of elucidation. This kind of complexity can be found in modern convolutional neural networks, where it is impossible to trace causally what produced the output.

Lego 1

Lego is an expert at handling complexity. Even simple sets would be hard to construct without a systematic breakdown.

Not all systems are convoluted. Lego systems are "compound”, which means that they are parts, often made of parts made of parts.

Lego 2

To handle the complexity of a compound, we can break them down into their individual components.

Lego 3

To allow us to construct, lego presents one step at a time, and in this way gives us a small window into the enormous complexity of the final product.

Domains and complexity

In most cases software developement is about making a program that will help make sense of a domain. In most cases the complexity we relate do is some mix of compound and convoluted. Our job then becomes to carve reality into sensible pieces.

Forcing perspective

We do this by forcing a perspective on the user. This perspective is the window of what is instantiated in the program, and how the user interface presents the problem to us.

The human interface

However, there is a second interface, and that is consciousness itself, which we must always take into account when we handle complexity for our clients.

A program

The computer program must show us reality in a compound way, just like the lego drawings, but allow us enough mental space to at the end assemble the complex reality into a ready- carved mental model.