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The final part of this book examines the practical consequences of
the dynamics of the emerging global system and the technology that underpins it
for decision making in development.
Design itself is a process of compromise to find acceptable
solutions within large potential solution spaces. The notion of bounded
rationality was propounded by Herbert Simon to explain the limits of human
capability in such situations (Simon, 1957). He coined the word satisficing to
explain the compromise strategy of arriving at an acceptable solution rather
than pursuing of an unattainable optimised solution.
One consequence of the inevitable compromise in achieving a design
solution in the face of complexity is that any non-trivial solution also
contains unanticipated characteristics and consequences. An increasingly well
known example is the consequences of robust characteristics designed into
ARPANet, the precursor to the Internet. In order to enhance survivability
during a possible nuclear war, the core of the system was able to relocate
itself between host computers depending upon availability and capacity. As a
result the current global network is in no way amenable to centralised control.
Bryan Lawson has demonstrated that design students develop
additional rules and constraints as one means of further reducing solution
spaces. In some respects this more constrained problem offers easier routes to
solution than the less bounded one. At a meta-level the end of the Cold War has
removed one clear set of constraints on decision making. As a result it seems
that the attention span of developed nations is incapable of dealing with the
unconstrained complexity of Ohmae's "multi-polar" world. As a consequence, for
better or worse, vast areas lying beyond the core economies of the triad
introduced in Chapter 2, merit only intermittent attention from the centre.
The pursuit of greater added value has led to the recognition of
the emerging global system as an "information economy" and this relegates
developing countries to the peripheral areas beyond the triad core. Information
and communication technologies have enabled the disaggregation of the
production chain into a network by locating each activity specifically at its
point of greatest comparative advantage. The ability to disaggregate the
intellectual capital produced by the divergent stage of the design process from
the convergent, focused discipline of the production process has been enhanced
by the ability to control production lines from across national boundaries. In
some instances complementary manufacturing takes place at both ends of such
relationships, however, Alain Lipietz argues that the ability to separate
production from consumption signals the end of the "Fordist compromise", his
term for the Keynesian social-democratic paradigm which was accepted during
most of the Cold War period. In the neo-liberal view, employers need not pay
the production workers remote from intended markets sufficiently well to
consume the products of their own labour .
Part III looks at past attempts to design development pathways
into the industrialised world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in
order to emphasise the path dependence of such strategies and the complexity of
outcomes. |
