The Rise of Holistic Thinking

Good design is the result of an unusual mix of two very dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing that must work together to a com­mon end; reduc­tive approaches (to define a prob­lem) and holis­tic approaches (to solve — or rede­fine — the prob­lem by con­sid­er­ing every aspect). The com­bi­na­tion is a pow­er­ful syn­the­sis which relies on a bal­ance between com­pet­ing forces.
Design­ers have under­stood the impor­tance of this bal­ance — and thus the indis­pens­able role of holis­tic think­ing in design meth­ods — for a long time. But as a con­se­quence of the long-standing dom­i­nance of indus­trial pro­duc­tion processes and log­ics, which elim­i­nated or severely restricted oppor­tu­ni­ties for most peo­ple to design any part of the fab­ric of their every­day lives, holis­tic approaches and think­ing have had min­i­mal vis­i­bil­ity in the mod­ern cul­tural land­scape.
That seems to be chang­ing, and I sus­pect few would dis­pute the rise in vis­i­bil­ity and impor­tance of design within the cul­tural land­scape. Some might say we are in the midst of a renais­sance of design (that com­par­i­son breaks down under a crit­i­cal lens, in the end demon­strat­ing more the pos­i­tive aspi­ra­tions of design advo­cates than any­thing else).
Look­ing at the cul­ture as a whole, the rise of design is one aspect of a larger and much more impor­tant cul­tural shift: the rise of holis­tic think­ing. This shift towards holis­tic views is chang­ing the things we talk about and think about, and hold cen­tral as the ele­ments of our basic frame of ref­er­ence — in short, the way we con­ceive of the world.
The con­cepts in the list below are good exam­ples of the rise of holis­tic think­ing across dis­ci­plines and fields. Seem­ingly willy-nilly (which is exactly the point!), all these ideas rely on, include, or enhance holis­tic view­points at some level:

It’s no acci­dent that this list is also an index of many of the major ideas and con­cerns of our day. What does it mean? Well, it’s good for design at the moment. And maybe there’s a book in it for some­one with the time to syn­the­size an idea and work up a solid treatment…

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Category: Ideas
 Tags: , , , , , 3 comments »

3 Responses to “The Rise of Holistic Thinking”

  1. Dan Ward
    August 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 am

    Speak­ing of cul­tural shifts, design think­ing and holis­tic think­ing, I won­der if you’ve come across an eco­nomic the­ory called Dis­trib­utism? It’s sort of a “third-way” alter­na­tive to cap­i­tal­ism and social­ism, and has a strong empha­sis on “pro­duc­tion by the masses” instead of “mass pro­duc­tion.” It’s a very design-friendly phi­los­o­phy.
    I wrote a short essay explor­ing the rela­tion­ship between dis­trib­utism and web 2.0 tech­nol­ogy. It seems to me that web 2.0 is largely a dis­trib­utist move­ment, even if nobody knows that par­tic­u­lar word.
    You can find the arti­cle here: http://danwardonline.googlepages.com/distributismandweb2.0
    I’d love to hear what you think of it!
  2. joe lamantia
    August 4th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

    I’ll take a look at Dis­trib­utism — from the quick sum­mary you pro­vided I can see some tie ins with some of the themes of new social / cul­tural / eco­nomic pro­duc­tion mod­els I was deal­ing with in a sub­se­quent post Cul­tural Next Fron­tiers For Design: New Eco­nomic and Mod­els
    And there are some inter­est­ing obser­va­tions on holis­tic think­ing in the exten­sive dis­cus­sion thread inspired by Todd Wilkens’ (of Adap­tive Path) post­ing Why Usabil­ity Is a Path to Fail­ure.
    Lastly — I’m see­ing lots of men­tions of fail­ure pop­ping up all over in the design com­mu­nity these days. Maybe we’re pre­emp­tively col­lec­tively uncon­sciously acknowl­edg­ing some­thing for the cul­ture at large…?
  3. Rafael Elias Venturini
    December 19th, 2009 at 4:10 am

    There is not a bet­ter per­son to speak about holis­tic think­ing than the guru of man­age­ment, Peter Drucker, who was an advo­cate for can­dor behav­ior across all sec­tor of the orga­ni­za­tion. Speak­ing clearly and involv­ing many dif­fer­ent man­agers to come up with the best con­clu­sion. Peter Drucker is to this date remem­ber by many such as Jack Welch, AG Lafley, etc etc…

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