Layers are spasming

As we live through this pandemic, and hope for a huggable future, I was reminded of pace-layering.

The world is multisystemic. Everything changes but never at uniform speed. Pace layering is an excellent way to model rates of change within a system.

Shearing layers is a concept coined by architect Frank Duffy, which was later elaborated by Stewart Brand in hisbook, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Brand, 1994), and refers to buildings as composed of several layers of change. The concept has been adopted by a number of technology vendors to also describe the different layers of systems within an organization.

— Wikipedia 

The outer layers move much faster, and are volatile, like fashion and commerce. These fast moving layers innovate and can absorb shock. As a designer, who has worked in e-commerce, I’m well familiar with these fast changes.

The lower layers move slower, and are more stable. Designers are relatively alien to this layer. As Bruce Sterling said, no designer ever designs her way into the US Senate.

All layers are capable of sudden change, revolution, epiphanies, catastrophes. But they’ll be few and far in between as the depth increases. Yet the deeper the layer that experiences a sudden change, the more extreme the impact will be on the outer layers.

As we can see and feel right now, when nature changes, all the other layers are tossed in the air like confetti.

Designers are optimistic by nature. We want to change “existing situations into preferred ones” Herb Simon. We’ll be busy for the foreseeable future, that’s for sure.