EMBEDDED ORDER:
CAN WE DESIGN HOMEOSTASIS?

In nature we observe order at every scale, from the subatomic particles, atoms, crystals, organisms, to plants, forests, weather systems.  These seemingly constantly ordered structures are active complex systems, in which transition phases and bifurcation, ‘far from equilibrium’ states and catastrophes occur.  As in every natural system, self-regulative and self-organising mechanisms reinstate order.  In that way, systems adapt, survive and evolve. This self-regulative mechanism is called homeostasis.

The built environment is comprised of different, autonomous entities that interact together creating systems and sub-systems within a network, organising macroscopically complex behaviour.  It is a self-organising complex system guided by the properties of emergence.  It evolves, develops, learns and transforms, identifying each time and reacting to the variable needs by changing its behaviour accordingly for optimum solutions. The built web is characterised as a ‘homeostatic’ system, being in continuous interchanging states of crisis, continuously re-identifying itself.

The breaking down of order into disorder or disaster is marked by a critical point, a point of transition where the system becomes unstable.  The notion of the critical point can be explained in the built environment as an event.  A momentarily disorder which can lead to disaster and order, or collapse.  An event can be a traffic jam or an earthquake on an urban scale, or the flocking of people inside a museum or a sports facility on a building scale. Events are temporal phenomena, singularities that occur in time, ‘emergent phenomena’ that cause disturbances and irregularities.  In any system, when the input is larger than the threshold, the system tends to be in a situation of disorder. Singularities refer to those critical points or moments within a system when its qualities and quantities undergo a fundamental change.

If we examine events and the way we move through them in space, can we apply the results into the design process and trace optimum solutions for an ordered design?

The aim of the design is to create aesthetically and functionally ordered patterns and forms.  In order to avoid disorder or disaster can we try to create or predict an artificial homeostasis and then embed it into the design process and the built fabric?

The purpose of this presentation is to identify processes between order and disorder in complex adaptive systems and try to incorporate them into the design process for creating new configurations and optimum solutions.  By using these theories borrowed from modern physics and biology is it possible to predict disorder and prevent disaster by creating computable generated patterns that will add to the design process? Can we predict the event? Can we design taking into account the event in order to predict disorder?