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How one thing leads to another: a complexity perspective on innovation

David Lane

We are surrounded by artifacts – things human beings create and produce for use by human beings. Our activities and our interactions with other human beings are carried out through and with artifacts. Indeed, social organization without artifacts to support it is unthinkable. All artifacts have a history – as do all the modes of interaction among people in which artifacts figure. In this talk, I propose to develop a theory about the processes through which artifact histories are realized: how new artifact types come into being, how their tokens proliferate and become incorporated into patterns of human interaction, and how new patterns of interaction among human beings and the artifacts they create are generated.

The primary questions that the theory seeks to address are about the kinds of social structures that support the processes of artifact innovation, how these structures modulate the conflicting functionalities that underlie proliferation of artifact tokens and generation of new artifact types, and how these structures transform themselves as they incorporate new kinds of functionality around new kinds of artifacts. In addition, the theory seeks to explain the increasing rate of generation of new artifact types, particularly over the last five or so centuries, in terms of a positive feedback dynamic that links the proliferation of new artifacts, the new patterns of human activity that organize around these artifacts, and the generation of new types of artifacts, which then proliferate, leading to new patterns of human activity...

In the talk, I will illustrate the theory by means of some episodes in the early history of printing.