Double Helix Design Patterns
Main Pattern
The Main Pattern of the Double Helix Design Patterns provides an overview of the recursive ways living things make decisions, create value, manage limited resources, interact with others, store and use learnings, and tap into their creative potential. Design emerges from the multi-perspectival understanding of an agent as a system and immersion in the context environment the agent is a part of.
“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behaviour over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”
0.1. The world can be seen as layers of self-similar patterns.
We are constantly trying to make sense of the complex world around us. One way to do this is by looking for patterns that repeat at different scales or levels of detail. Once identified at one level of scale, a pattern can also be anticipated or recognized at others, higher or lower levels, which makes identifying this pattern a very useful proposition.
0.2. The core self-similar pattern is not a geometric, material, or biological, but a pattern of behaviour.
Designers’ primary focus is people — individuals, teams, companies, and complex interactions between them. Those are examples of decision making entities or agents. We can also call these agents systems, more precisely autopoietic systems. The key feature of these systems is their pattern of behaviour, which reveals their purpose or “raison d’être.” It is the way agents sense, perceive, make decisions, and act with their environment, assuming their identity along the way.
0.3. Each core pattern is nested within a context pattern, which is again nested in even wider context pattern.
We often think about the ways in which individual agents—whether they are people, groups, or a combination of objects and people—interact with their environments. But it’s important to remember that these environments are also agents embedded within even larger systems — and that these systems, in turn, are part of even wider context systems.
This nested structure of agents within wider agents can be observed at many different levels, from the cellular and organic to the social or cultural. And at each level, we see a self-similar pattern of behaviour.
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In mathematics, a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e., the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines, are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales. Self-similarity is a typical property of fractals.
Wikipedia
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Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment.
“Agency introduces meaning in the world. Agency is fundamental to life.” –Stuart Kauffman
0.4. The agent’s primary purpose, as demonstrated by its pattern of behaviour, is survival through self-generation. It needs to create value to enable self-generation.
The primary purpose of agents, as self-organizing and self-sustaining systems, whether they are people, companies, countries, or other living systems, is survival through self-generation. To achieve this purpose, or any smaller goals derived from it, these agents must be able to create value for themselves and within their environments. This value creation can take many forms — generation of energy, production of resources, establishment of relationships with other agents — but it is essential for the agent’s self-generation or autopoiesis.
0.5. The self-generating agent always cares about limited resources available to it.
An agent is always concerned with the limited resources that are available to it, such as time, energy, finance, intelligence, attention, etc.. In order to survive and thrive, it must be able to create value, but it must also be careful to conserve its energy and other resources and avoid wasting or depleting them. This means that the agent must carefully balance its need to create value with its need to conserve its resources, and must constantly adapt and adjust that behaviour in response to changes in the environment.
0.6. The self-generating agent’s core feature then is decision-making ability which is balancing of value creation vs limited resources.
At the heart of an agent’s decision-making ability is the ongoing process of balancing value creation with limited resources. This process reveals the agent’s fundamental feature of care — a combination of care for its own survival and care for the use of the resources that enable that survival. As a result, the decisions that agents make are not always fully optimized, but are more often “good enough” or satisficing — satisfying enough given the constraints of the situation and the agent’s limited cognitive and other resources. This approach, defined by Herbert A. Simon as bounded rationality, allows agents to navigate complex and uncertain environments in a way that is both rational and effective.
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The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production') refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
The concept has since been applied to the fields of cognition, systems theory, architecture and sociology. Niklas Luhmann briefly introduced the concept of autopoiesis to organizational theory.
Wikipedia
0.7. The decision making ability of balancing value creation and limited resources is informed by the deep and ongoing interactions between an agent and its environment.
Agents never function in isolation — they are always affected by the environment, or even a set of overlapping environments in which they function, like the physical, cultural, business, etc. The environment is, of course, not just the physical, natural, or built, it is also a network of other agents, physical objects, processes, norms, and other factors that influence the agent.
If it were not for the dynamic nature of these environments, agents would be able to rely on a simple value vs resources rule and always make optimal decisions, which is what the simplified economic utility theory calls for. But since nothing lives in isolation, agents must develop ways to sense, perceive, process, interact with, and learn from their environments.
These interactions with the environment are known as sensorimotor loops which inform higher and more abstract level of agent’s cognition.
0.8. Interactions help the agent to assign meaning and identity to the elements of the environment related to the intention-based-value the elements create for the agent. We call this sense-making.
The interactions between an agent and its environment play a key role in the process of sense-making — the way that the agent, based on its intentions, assigns meaning and identity to the elements of its environment, including other agents. Through these interactions, the agent is able to assess the value that different elements of the environment have for it.
This behaviour is shaped by the affordances of the environment — the opportunities and possibilities that the environment offers to the agent. As these interactions between the agent and its environment unfold, they give rise to assemblages — temporary and dynamic configurations of elements brought together by the agent. These assemblages are constantly shifting, reflecting the complex and dynamic nature of the agent’s intentions, actions, and environments.
“What we know changes what we see. What we see changes what we know.” — Jean Piaget
Eg., in a park, two parents seeking a break might focus their attention on objects that are sit-able, like a bench, a short wall, or a sit-able fence. By interacting with these elements in their environment, they are able to assign meaning and identity to them based on their need for a place to rest. But as the needs of the situation change, so do the meanings and identities of these elements as well. When their children want to play soccer and need a goal post, the parents might stand up, offer the bench as a goal post, and join the game. In this way, the bench takes on a new meaning and identity as a shooting target, and the whole assemblage of people and objects shifts to accommodate this new purpose.
This demonstrates how the meanings and identities of elements in an environment are constantly evolving in response to the needs and goals of the agents interacting with them.
0.9. Sense-making allows the agent to develop the sense of self — its own identity.
The sense-making process plays a crucial role in the development of sense of self. As the agent interacts with its environment and receives feedback from its surroundings, it is able to assign meaning and identity to the elements of its environment, and in relation to the environment the identity of itself. This self-identification allows the agent to differentiate itself from other elements in the environment and develop self-awareness.
However, it’s important for this self-identification to be recognized and correlated with the identification of the agent by the environment. This is an important factor in the agent’s ability to adapt as it helps the agent understand its place in the environment and the role it plays within it.
As an example, consider a person who self-identifies as a designer. While this person may see himself as a designer, it is only through the recognition and acknowledgement of his skills and abilities by others that he is able to fully occupy this role/identity. If a company hires designers and does not recognize the value-creating design skills of this person, he will not be hired as a designer.
Another example, a person is a math teacher in a school and is acknowledged by her students and colleagues for her ability to teach math. She serves in the role of math teacher in that environment. However, when she returns home and takes care of her children, she is recognized and acknowledged by her children in the role of mother, without much or any reference to the role of teacher.
These roles are dependent on the context in which the agent operates and the recognition and acknowledgement of the agent’s role by those around them, creating a sense of self as a result.
0.10. By enacting in the environment toward its primary purpose of survival, the agent also creates value in the environment. It does so through a role or function, along with other agents in complementary roles.
As an agent interacts with its environment in pursuit of its primary purpose of survival, it also creates value in the environment. This value can be seen as the result of the agent’s role or function and the interactions and coordination with other agents that may have complementary roles within the environment — in the formation of assemblages. The driving force in the formation of the complementary roles agents play is the explicit or implicit purpose of the environment as a higher level agent. For example, a school with the purpose of providing holistic education has the roles of teachers of various disciplines, roles of students, and roles of support staff, etc.. Diversity of roles is an important concept here.
Tyson Yunkaporta in Sandtalk writes “The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual differences, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. This prevents you from clustering into narcissistic flash mobs. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar than you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.”
Through these interactions and coordination, the agent is able to create value that goes beyond its own individual survival, and contributes to the overall functioning of the environment as a whole.
0.11. Value created in and for the environment directly correlates with the agent’s extended sense of self, or extended identity, but only when there is an ongoing feedback loop from the environment to the agent.
“True freedom, in contrast, is achieved when we can free ourselves from transient, self-centered cravings and commit ourselves to accomplishing something of value in the world.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Previously mentioned fundamental feature of care — a combination of care for agent’s own survival and the care for use of the resources that enable that survival — now also includes the care for the immediate environment.
The value that an agent creates within its environment can be seen as an extension of its sense of self or identity, but this connection is only possible when there is an ongoing feedback loop between the agent and its environment. Through this feedback loop, the agent is able to receive acknowledgment about the effects of its actions on and in the environment, and use this information to adjust and adapt its behaviour in order to continue to create value.
Take for example, an employee within a team that gets feedback from her lead and her peers on an ongoing basis, or even just a few times a year, as opposed to an employee that gets no feedback about her efforts or outputs. The former one has a strong sense of how she is contributing to the team's purpose and a strong identification with the rest of the team, while the latter one is disconnected from understanding if her efforts contribute to the team at all.
This feedback loop allows the agent to maintain a sense of connection with the environment and a sense of continuity between herself and the value she creates. Hence, it helps to extend the agent’s sense of self and identity. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that the agent’s self blends or merges with the extended self, but rather that the agent has awareness of both.
0.12. The feedback will inform how the agent focuses its attention on creating value in the environment, while not focusing on other aspects of self or creating value for a narrow sense of self.
The feedback loops between an agent and its environment determine how the agent focuses its attention and efforts. This helps the agent to avoid distractions that may be irrelevant or detrimental to its own functioning, therefore draining its limited resources, and instead focus on creating value in a way that aligns with its needs, goals, and purpose.
However, this attention can be hijacked in many ways.
“Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we’re seeing the results of that. We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.” –Justin Rosenstein in “Social Dillema”
You can see that attention is still creating value, but not for the agent and its environment, but for a completely different (corporate) system.
The process of prioritization and focus helps the agent avoid becoming overly centred on narrow aspects of its own identity or self-interest, and instead maintain a broader and more flexible perspective on value creation that includes its environment as well.
When an agent is focusing its attention on creating value in the environment, rather than focusing on other aspects of its own self, we see behaviour that can be described as self-emptying – setting aside or suppressing one’s own ego or self-interest in order to focus on a higher goal or purpose. In the case of an agent, this might involve prioritizing the needs of the immediate and extended environments over the needs of the narrow self.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
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In design, assemblages refer to temporary and dynamic configurations of elements that are brought together by an agent (such as a designer or user) in order to achieve a specific purpose or goal.
These elements can include physical objects, digital tools, social relationships, cultural practices, and many other kinds of resources. Assemblages can be seen as a way for agents to create value in their environment by combining and manipulating different elements in innovative and creative ways.
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Affordance is a concept that originated in psychology and was later adopted and popularized in design, particularly in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and industrial design. The term was coined by psychologist James J. Gibson in the late 1970s.
In essence, affordance refers to the potential actions or functionalities that an object or environment offers to a user based on the object's properties or perceived characteristics. It's about the relationship between the properties of an object and the actions a person can perform with or on that object.
For example, a doorknob affords twisting, pushing, or pulling, conveying that it can be used to open a door. A chair affords sitting, a button affords pressing, and a touchscreen affords tapping and swiping.
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Sense-making is the process through which individuals or organizations organize and interpret information from their environment to make it meaningful and understandable. It involves creating a coherent understanding of a situation or phenomenon, often in ambiguous or complex contexts, to guide actions, decisions, and responses.Item description
0.13. Creating value for a narrow sense of self is the key anti-pattern. It’s interruption of layers of value creation to wider environments by the self-referential agenda, reducing the sense of self to lower levels.
Focusing on creating value for a narrow sense of self and neglecting the value of the environment can be seen as a key negative behaviour of an agent. This self-referential agenda reduces the agent’s sense of self to lower levels and interrupts the layers of value creation that are essential for the agent to function within its wider environment. This behaviour is ultimately detrimental to the agent itself, as it undermines the agent’s ability to adapt and respond to changes in the environment, and reduces the agent’s overall viability.
Colloquially, we might call this the concept of evil, as opposed to the above mentioned value creation for the agent and nesting environments that we associate with the concept of good.
For example, we can consider a team of professionals as an agent. An employee in a team might cause conflict with a few others, preventing the whole team from delivering a project on time. This might further cause the company to lose an important contract, which in turn might cause the company to lay off people due to a lack of financial resources. The employee will not consider himself evil, but rather someone who is keen on keeping things his way. Yet based on the second and third order negative effects, that employee’s action can be characterized as evil by the laid-off people, since it jeopardized their and their families’ existence.
In contrast, an agent that is able to balance good for itself with good for the environment is more likely to be able to maintain its stability and vitality within the context environment as a whole.
0.14. To preserve the balancing of value creation vs limited resources rules over iterations of self-generation of self and extended self, agents learn, and establish norms of behaviour.
Learning is agent’s key activity that helps with the creation of value and the conservation of resources over long periods of time and with multiple agents at the same time. Learning can be seen as an acquisition and continual evidencing of a world model according to which the agent can acquire certain outcomes with minimum amount of uncertainty or errors, as proposed by prof. Karl Friston in Active Inference model. These learnings include individual and group norms of behaviour. In the social setting, we’d call them cultural norms and shared narratives.
Agents as autopoietic systems therefore prefer the relative equilibrium of the environment to be able to learn and establish norms of behaviour as ongoing sensing, decision-making, and acting rules. Too much stability though, is also counterproductive, causing learning inactivity and biases. Biases use the same value vs resource mechanism and can often lead agents to wrong conclusions, especially in an ever-changing environment.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
It is existentially important for an agent to continue learning and to be curious, examining new information and comparing it to an existing model she might have, as well as to be humble in her confidence about that model. Models are just representations of aspects of reality, they are all false (including this one), but some are useful. Sometimes.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
0.15. To survive and thrive in the ever-changing environments, agents often go beyond learnings based on the past experiences and create novel and innovative solutions that haven’t existed before.
In addition to learning, that is past-based, agent has many ways to act future-based. The future based decisions and actions are the result of the ways an agent wants to affect the current state of things in the direction of the future, preferable, state of things, which is pretty much Herbert Simon’s definition of the activity of design.
This process is sometimes very organic and unintentional, especially in nature. Due to changes in the environment, certain biological features of animal can be repurposed for other function that can give that animal certain advantage. For example, birds have developed feathers for thermal regulation, but have repurposed, or exapted them for flight. Or that repurposing or brand new creativity can be very intentional, especially in the human domain.
The creative agent has to be, on one hand, deeply immersed in their environment or domain, and on the other hand, have the ability to alter their perspective on the same environment.
Drawing on other perspectives, either through collaboration with other agents, including the future self, or the ability to deeply understand them, can lead to insights which are more often related to a proper understanding of the problem than a novel solution to the problem.
“Do the right thing instead of doing things right.” — Peter Drucker
In other words, it is essential to focus on solving the right problem rather than simply finding the most efficient or technically correct solution but to the wrong problem. Only once the problem is properly understood can a lasting, effective solution be proposed. Even excellent solutions for the wrong problem will quickly show little value to the agent and its environment.
For example, one can say that one of the world’s greatest problems is dwindling energy sources. One perspective might be to start working on new ways to generate energy, but another might be to work on conservation of energy through a range of cheaper, less demanding, and longer lasting solutions, e.g., LED lightbulbs, house insulation, using public transit rather than gas guzzlers, and designing cities to be mixed-use, denser, and more walkable, so that citizens barely need motorized transportation at all.
“To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
“Design is conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.”
16. Life then can be seen as the process of coupling of agents and environments at multiple scales connected by care for mutual existence and meaning.
Christopher Alexander, an American architect and design theorist who deeply understood the relationship between humans and built environments, had a core idea in his work that the world we shape then inevitably shapes us. This idea has been rephrased by many thinkers and practitioners throughout the history of humankind.
Alexander’s approach as a designer-architect was to unfold wholeness, an iterative design process in which, at each stage of the build, a designer interacts with a building design and assesses the feeling of wholeness or aliveness of any given physical aspect of it, improving the quality of less desirable parts as the build progresses. From everything written above, one could say that Alexander always cared how agents would couple with their environments.
So, his method was not to create blueprints and hand it over to builders, but as a designer, an agent, to be in continuous interaction with the build, the environment, adjusting designs on the spot, according to the assessment of wholeness. He was so keen on this quality because he knew that those spaces would create the same quality of wholeness or aliveness in their residents.
It’s interesting that Alexander introduced the concept of patterns as an aid or scaffolding for less experienced architects that have learned their skills just through established methods, to transition to more advanced and more natural ways to design buildings. However, even the pattern languages as an aid need to be dropped eventually, and the architect should design from the pure participation and gut.
So finally you learn that you already know how to create this ageless species which is the physical embodiment, in buildings, of the quality without a name, because it is a part of you but that you cannot come to it until you first master a pattern language, and then pass beyond the language, once it has taught you to allow yourself to act as nature does…
—Christopher Alexander
Similar is the case with Double Helix Patterns. They are not a method but observational framework of how agents in reality function. It’s called Double Helix because of two strands of DNA tightly coupled, dancing together, that represent in a way an agent and its environment tightly coupled, dancing together, connected by care for mutual existence and meaning. I hope the patterns can also be a small aid for future designers to understand the forces that bond agents and their environment.
At some point, especially in the upcoming era of AI, designers will have to operate at much deeper levels, beyond the aesthetic and technical skills that AI will soon match or surpass. Understanding life, especially the human and social patterns of behaviour, and what we want to preserve or discard, will be a major design area of interest.
Next nine Double Helix Design Patterns provide more detailed explorations of the Main Pattern elements covered here.
“We don’t live alone. We make our living world together. No individual is alive alone. We are all joined together in the evolving, emerging, unfolding of biosphere as a whole. We are the conditions of one another’s existence.”
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The Main Pattern describes the behavioral patterns of many nested systems, most importantly including human systems. Here are a few takeaways for designers.
Value Creation Analysis
Analyze how the agent creates value for itself and its context environment.Continuous Feedback Integration
Gather feedback from the environment by participation and interaction whenever possible. Refine problem definitions and iterate on potential solutions in loops.Incorporate Multiple Perspectives
Encourage collaboration and draw on diverse perspectives. Engage with team members, stakeholders, and potential users to enrich problem definition and solution ideation.Systems-Centric Approach
Embrace a systems-thinking approach by considering the agent within its nested contexts. Design solutions that harmonize with the larger systems to ensure sustainable and meaningful outcomes. -
The Timeless Way of Building Christopher Alexander
Thinking in Systems Donella Meadows
The Science of the Artificial Herbert Simon
Complexity, a Guided Tour Melanie Mitchell
Mind in Life Evan Thompson
Design of Everyday Things Don Norman
Managing Complexity and Chaos in Times of Crises Dave Snowden
Sandtalk Tyson Yunkaporta
Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles Karl J. Friston et al.
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis John Vervaeke
The Language of Creation Matthieu Pageau
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky