Complexity to this point has dealt with understanding its defining characteristics and identifying examples in technology and nature. The next step in the development of the field is to find useful if not practical application of this knowledge in the form of intentional design and construction of systems. Architects may not be able to control the many interactions within a system, but they can learn to tune the environment and introduce opposing forces to harness the power of complexity for societal gain.
Virtual gatherings of individuals for a particular purpose — online communities — are marginally understood by conventional sociology and interaction design. This is an area of great interest by both domains, but as yet there is little agreement over strategy and structure or how the dynamics of the Internet change the studied results. Communities, like any system, are not acting in isolation, nor will they resemble tomorrow their snapshot from today. They are dynamic networks that are likely more complex than complicated.
Online communities are many-bodied systems with a wide range of membership, much of it overlapping into multiple forums both online and offline. These members use different interfaces — distinct web site designs, desktop client applications, automated agents, and human proxies — to engage with other individuals, creating a network of human-computer interactions that might be its own complexity level. Likewise, these forums facilitate communal knowledge that prompts changes in social understanding, activism, populist convention, cultural terminology, technological innovation, and government policy. The emergence of this communal knowledge, then, could be viewed as a component of a complex social system where legislation, institutional aggression and national rhetoric are the result.
Forums require a critical mass of active membership and content in order to achieve sustainability. This is a need that changes over time, suggesting forces of opposition that might create self-organizing criticality. A sustainable community also impacts the ability of other online communities to thrive, pulling membership from less successful or dying communities to enrich its own culture. Size may contribute to both sides of that criticality, as a large community changes the experience of individuals even as it increases content through member interactions. Complexity may be present in this notion of phase transition.
Interface design has evolved from isolated programmers dictating interaction rules to user-driven input (still, a benevolent dictation) and user-created tools. Simplicity is easier to comprehend and thus offers fewer obstacles to engagement. Perhaps simulations and the process of creating such models may force designers into a clearer understanding of the core needs of interaction and what the impact of those choices are on the greater system. The tools of understanding complexity may prove to be useful tools for understanding the optimal construction of application interfaces.
Further abstracted, there is a notion of ethics embedded into this connection between component action and emergent behavior. Is it ethical to make use of knowledge of complexity to tune the membership interactions with a forum to alter communal actions? Even if the effects of a single forum prove beneficial to society, what about the responsibility for how those new behaviors affect the next complexity level? If a political forum were engineered through complex dynamics to produce a society of no wars, would that have the same catastrophic effects on the world scale as fighting small forest fires did on Yellowstone Park? The ethics of our implementational choices are very much a matter of conscience; they do not operate in isolation.
For my part, I see the domain of complexity contained in two directions, by system scope and level of interaction. I am most interested in the scale that includes humans operating computers in the context of a society. I am less inclined to devote time to the minutia of computational interaction and instead focus on the level that includes user experience and cultural effect. Complexity is broader than that, but my interests are not.
