Friday, June 3, 2011

Infrastructure of Conundrums

From anthropologist Constance Perin - - By "infrastructure of conundrums", she means that paradoxes, dilemmas, and contradictions appear often enough in technology-driven enterprises to warrant being re-understood as expectable outcroppings of complexity.  To manage a complex system is to keep untying the the knots it can get itself into.  The main problem in complex systems is that designers and operators know much about the technology's inner workings and its operating environment, but they also know that they have not imagined, deduced, or experienced all of the ways it can generate unexpected events.

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