Modeling Change

If there’s one thing that’s consistent — it’s change. Time and experience plays a huge role in how people’s disposition may change over time, but so too does the context and environmental conditions.

At first, this may seem like a problem, design is tasked with conceptualizing things as they are, but how can design do that if what it’s modeling is always a moving target? When it comes to modeling anything, it’s important to know that it’s an approximation of the patterns and phenomena one has observed in reality within a specific time and from a specific point of view. If designers have any chance in accounting for change, they have to change with it by constantly updating their models to reflect observations, but it’s also critical to take into account a range of perspectives and interpretations to ensure that what they perceive is thoroughly considered and dimensional. In short, designers have to anticipate and incorporate change into the process so as to have a reasonably approximate interpretation of the system at the moment.

Complex adaptive systems are prime examples of sufficiently complicated infrastructures with myriad interconnected agents at varying levels designed to respond to change in unpredictable and non linear ways. When it comes to modeling human change via mental model diagrams — it’s actually more helpful to use mental models as a stepping stone to empathy and understanding of the users you are designing for, and apply those insights into a larger ecosystem map. People’s mental models help them make sense, understand, and accomplish tasks in the world — and given we have a reasonable approximation of how they perceive the world and what they set out to do, we can model out the larger environmental conditions that can accommodate these perspectives, but also adapt to them as they change over time.