Learning from the Ants, Part Two

In system design (at the most general level) there ought to be a distinction between the design of end-states and processes. While I’m tempted to tie the subject into the difference between, say, Nozick and Rawls, let’s try this: Architects, by their very nature, are end-staters. You conceive an entire project as a piece, and intend that piece for a simultaneous completion at some point. That’s it. Walk away. It’ll be that way forever. Even in some fairly complex multi-phase master planning, there are rarely more than three distinct phases (end-states), and often in truth only the first or the last are actually designed as a totality, the others as messy transitional experiences of some kind. So, when I came across this in the world of biology, it made me pause:

There is an important distinction between a blueprint and a recipe. A blueprint is a detailed, point-for-point specification of some end product like a house or a car. One diagnostic feature of a blueprint is that it is reversible. Give an engineer a car and he can reconstruct its blueprint. But offer to a chef a rival’s piece de resistance to taste, and he will fail to reconstruct the recipe. You can’t isolate a particular blob of soufflé and seek one word of the recipe that ‘determines’ that blob. All of the words of the recipe, taken together with all the ingredients, combine to form the whole soufflé. – Richard Dawkins “Genes Aren’t Us,” from A Devil’s Chaplain

Dawkins’ description extends to more than the just biology. I think any complex, durable system is subject to the same stricture. This is why a city has never been successfully designed as an end-state. The combination of dozens of variables that effect the design slowly, linger for decades, and change from year to year almost require the recipe formula. Yet, (with the possible exception of Jane Jacobs’ strange little book written at the end of her life,) the solutions proposed are almost always of the “blueprint” type – a single “done” end-state.

Why?