The result must be unpredictable
To make the feedback meaningful in a step-by-step process, the process must be open-ended, hence partly unpredictable. It must lack a fixed, predetermined end-state. This is necessary because adaptation itself means nothing if changes cannot be made in response to the process of adaptation. By definition, such changes cannot be foreseen.
In the more typical, more heavily mechanical production of our modern society — and especially in the structure-destroying cases I have referred to — the end-product is fixed too early and too rigidly. For a variety of reasons — legal, financial, and procedural — under modern conditions the thing is fixed too exactly, too far ahead, and has far too little freedom to unfold.
When adaptation and feedback are working, the result must be unpredictable. There must be tacit recognition that the end-result is not yet known.
This kind of judgement can only be made well in the real world. No detailed architectural drawing, no matter how careful, can reflect this kind of subtlety. The information needed to make the judgement includes the wholeness of the foundations, walls, building mass — which do not even exist at the time the building plans are made. You need the real building, in its emergent state, to make this judgement accurately.
Whether one uses the real building or some simulation of it, it is necessary to make this judgement as near as possible to a time when all the information is available, and at a time when the impact of the full emerging wholeness can be seen, and felt, and judged.
The key point of this new type of theory — divergent evolutionary paths leading from tiny differences to very large differences of end-result — is exactly the one which I argue must occur in building living structure. […] In this sense, even one small detail can completely change the necessary whole which is most in harmony with the situation, and this difference can only be seen dynamically as the whole unfolds.
Thus the field of centers which is at the very heart of living structure — is inherently so subtle that it can only be created dynamically, and is inherently unpredictable in the precise definition of its end-state.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/8 Step-by-step adaptation#