a paradigm shift
There is a lot to discuss here - the ideas are rich and not all of the challenges are self-evident. I want to flag something that only appears if we change the agency paradigm from one that is almost entirely focused on design and planning to one that reconsiders the position and role of agency to give more equal weight to emergence and spontaneity. The contrast might be best understood as follows: The
“edge” exists within a system and its peripheral and emergent character is what defines its edginess. But there is also the “edge” which is extra systemic, not on the edge because there is no center, new systems, with new centers and edges may or may not be emerging. Such novelty is unknowable in advance and is very difficult to make sense of from within the existing system, even from the edge of existing systems. To me what getting beyond a control room means is that we become much more accepting and interested in the non-causal, non-narrative based sense making that is rooted in what we already know about center/periphery and adaptation - which must adapt from what exists. The ideas is to crowd surf novel emergence, without knowing if it is center or periphery or has causal origin or direction or meaning. The control room tracks the planes, avoids collisions and plans take-offs. The control room changes when GPS allows all planes to track the other planes, and this is a unknowable and emergent change that comes in from the edge. To paradigm shift out of this view of agency - making better control rooms that integrate the edge - towards a combination of planning and improvisation requires a shift away from the current planning oriented pretensions of agency and a bias towards understanding new things as adaptations or ‘rational’ from the perspective of the old systems. Things happen and we can dance with those phenomena in ways that were not dance in the past. This is being and not-being; doing and not-doing from the POV of discontinuity and non-continuous complex emergent novelty.
Hope this is helpful.