States and Nomads: Handling Software Complexity

Transcript

1. STATES AND NOMADS
   HANDLING SOFTWARE COMPLEXITY Zach Tellman @ztellman
6. X X X X O X O … … X O
8. X X X X O X O … … X O
9. I. SCIENTIFIC FORESTRY
13. II. WHAT IS A SYSTEM? OR WHAT IS THIS TALK ABOUT, ANYWAY?
14. COMPLEXITY RANDOMNESS from An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
15. COMPLEXITY RANDOMNESS from An Introduction to General Systems Thinking Formal Analysis Statistical Analysis
16. “Heuristic devices don’t tell you when to stop” ≈ No abstraction describes its own failures ≈ When you have a hammer, all the world looks like a nail
17. III. CRITICAL THEORY
18. Karl Marx Sigmund Freud
19. Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari
20. The layers are the strata. They come in pairs, one serving as substratum for the other. The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an interstratum) but on the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of consistency (here, it is a metastratum). from A Thousand Plateaus
22. RHIZOME
24. Jorge Luis Borges
25. …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. ON EXACTITUDE IN SCIENCE
26. IV. MODERN URBAN DESIGN
32. V. A PATTERN LANGUAGE
33. Christopher Alexander
34. THE QUALITY WITHOUT
    A NAME • alive • whole • comfortable • free • exact • egoless • eternal
35. THE QUALITY WITHOUT
    A NAME It is never twice the same, because it always takes its shape from the particular place in which it occurs.
36. THE QUALITY WITHOUT
    A NAME The wall runs east to west; the peach tree grows flat against its southern side. The sun shines on the tree and as it warms the bricks behind the tree, the warm bricks themselves warm the peaches on the tree. It has a slightly dozy quality. The tree, carefully tied to grow flat against the wall; warming the bricks; the peaches growing in the sun; the wild grass growing around the roots of the tree, in the angle where the earth and roots and wall all meet.
38. Richard Gabriel
39. VI. CLOSING THOUGHTS
40. Techne Metis
41. A SYLLABUS • Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard • Fictions and The Aleph by Borges • Invisible Cities by Calvino • Seeing Like A State by Scott • Patterns of Software by Gabriel • General Systems Thinking by Weinberg • Data and Reality by Kent • The Image of the City by Lynch • countless others
42. QUESTIONS?