Curiosity is Hunger
There’s a reason gluttony is a sin
In the book, Confluence, Cynthia Kurtz examines the relationship between planned systems and self-organizing systems. She does this in a number of contexts, looking at the ways planning and emergence impact each other.
An office building, for example, is almost entirely planned when it is at the stage of a blueprint. As it is being built, the realities “on the ground” — e.g., availability of resources, judgement of builders — shift away from the plan.
As the building is inhabited, tenants, policy, crime, law, weather, and entropy take it further from the plan. A lobby designed in the fabulous fifties style might be redone in a millenial minimalism. This isn’t part of the plan. Fashion and style are largely emergent. Fifty years on, the building is repurposed as living space because it’s too outdated to be any business’s flagship. One hundred years later, it’s a squat, being entirely reclaimed by the ecosystem.
Kurtz’ point of view isn’t that this is good or bad, but that it’s interesting, worth noticing, and worth commenting upon.
I read the book with an eye towards education and assessment. I had written pieces about how education is an ecosystem. Ecosystems are self-generating, but humans are part of the ecosystem, so human plans are also part of…
