The fact that it’s a new year really has little to do with this outburst, except that the new year has broken the back of the old year’s demanding schedule. It gives me a chance to visit things left by the wayside in the tumult that came before.

I’m here, again.

Regular visitors will know that I tend to riff on design and how I think it happens. I often chime in with head-shaking noises when people promote hackneyed visions of The Future With Software Agents, or Molecular Engineering, or operating systems, or planning. For well over 20 years I’ve been seeing and saying that the process of design—not merely of teapots and software and pharmaceutical lead compounds and seat cushions, but the deeper chain or practices and assumptions that binds science to engineering—is changing.

But not to something new. I realize today that what I really mean to say is more along the lines of, “Don’t be surprised when you wake up one morning and somebody you’ve been ignoring has eaten your lunch.” This is what I try to say to the University, to the software industry, to entrepreneurs, to manufacturers, to pharmaceutical designers, to programmers, to project managers, to conservationists and farmers, to lawyers, to basic researchers. Not that they’re wrong, but rather that their best-practices certification is about due to run out. I would rather say, and sometimes manage to mumble, a more nuanced refrain: “Everybody knows” that’s true, do they? Really? Every everybody?

And to save you the trouble of reading all the clap-trap I intend to set down, here’s the one real thing that I expect to be saying over and over again: We have to be more willing to build things before we understand them.

We already do build such things, surely. But in thinking and talking and teaching and legislating about them, we’re constrained by (among other things):

• the mythology of linearly separable reductionism
• the cultural divide between applied and theoretical science, and science and engineering, and modelers who depend on analytical forms vs. statistical ones
• the clash between legal and technical kinds of truth
• blinding specialization in science and engineering training, and inward-looking silos among practitioners
• modeling hubris, and the cult of mathematical tractability
• pedagogy recapitulates history

It’s come together for me, over the last few weeks. And now it’s time to write a little bit of it down. While I have a chance.

I hope to write a reasonably coherent mass of crap on the subject. Here’s the draft of the sections, which may vary as appropriate, and is in no special order:

• Information overload, the neurasthenia of our time
• All your singularities: Irrationality and the 2½th Culture
• What makes an “advanced” topic?
• Complexity is simple, complicated is hard
• Ways of seeing, and ways of making
• On the survival rate of plans, models, and their enemies
• Reliability, agility, flexibility, adaptability, robustness and opacity
• Indirect specification and ex post facto models
• How do you know when you’re done?