Designing for the future by creating conditions for desired behavior to be generated.

It isn't rocket science, though we seem intent on making it so.

Unlike previous years, I feel no great need to review the one about to pass. As always, we've devoted much time and energy to critiquing the city in which we live, generally from a perspective that is far simpler than local grandees believe.

There's a world outside New Albany, and in some other places new ideas can be seen to have led to positive improvements. Thinking is good. Ideas matter ... and so on. 

This article is a bit geeky, but as the one-paragraph takeaway shows, much intriguing information is offered. Give it fifteen minutes.

Toward Resilient Architectures 5: Agile Design, by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros (Metropolis)

 ... A central principle, as with Agile Methodology in software design, is that the operating system should be re-written, not to specify the behavior desired, but rather, create the conditions in which that behavior is most likely to be generated. This “generative design approach” — employing complex adaptive transformations, engaging economic processes, and exploiting Agile self-organizing capacities — is emerging as the key to resilient design for the future.