2 mins - reading time

“The concept of “soft systems” has a difficult, complex, and sporadic pedigree within Western philosophical and scientific tradition, though it did emerge gloriously – in full force across a wide variety of domains – during the 1960s.” * – that’s how Sanford Kwinter started his famous essay manifesto “Soft Systems”, published in Culture Lab.

He writes that this concept is powerfully represented by a collective experience of two “Copernican” events: Continental drift and the Earth through the Apollo astronaut’s lens.

What we call “Earth” should be called “Water”. This massive liquid object is our home and its stability is rooted in its dynamics.

Slowly but steadily, the very ground we walk and use as a synonym of permanence is actually not static.

“A system is “soft” when it is flexible, adaptable and evolving, when it is complex and maintained by a dense network of active information or feedback loops.”

NONLINEARITY

Nonlinearity is an important quality of soft systems. The main difference between linear and nonlinear systems is that latter cannot be understood as a pure sum of its parts. The interaction between them is an emergent property, so it cannot be seen by analysing the components separately.

Our culture moves away from classical mechanism and reductionism towards complexity and non-linearity.

GENETICS

Simple-looking but rich and complex, the epigenetic landscape gradually emerges out of the interaction with the environment. Before, it was believed that each gene contains individual traits (eye or hair colour, for example), and the organism is a sum of these elements, containing direct instructions. Now it became clear that genes are no more than anchors or triggers in a complex system of active, nonlinear relationships.

SPACE IN-BETWEEN HIGHLY CONTROLLED AND CHAOTIC

The critical point was discovered in a system's organisation during the Boolean Networks experiments made by Stuart Kauffman and others in the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complexity.

In most cases, the system's initial random behaviour would soon become highly ordered or stuck (upper image: grey areas are the frozen elements, white are the elements capable of movement). With some other settings, the system would manifest very chaotic behaviour.

The group discovers that by manipulating the system, they could artificially push it to and then suspend it at the in-between, intermediate state between "solid" and "gas" - "liquid". Communicability and sensitivity, together with robustness and dynamic self-regulation, this is the softest state.

*G. Bateson, A. Koestler, N.Chomsky, B. Fuller, cybernetics theory, information theory, general systems theory, holistic science etc

A summary of Sanford Kwinter, “Soft systems” in Culture lab 1, ed. Brian Boignon (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) and personal interpretation of its main ideas.

These concepts are essential to understand the work of Animaspace and our way of thinking about design, art and architecture: designing soft systems that can evolve over time instead of fixed and finite objects.