Helene Finidori

In my Plop 2018 paper, I proposed to consider patterns more assertively in their broad definition, as mediators between objects or events in the world and the ways we represent and interpret them. The objective being to better focus on their observational and communicative aspects in the context of systemic inquiry and design, and to enable coordination of action across identity and knowledge boundaries. Here I dive deeper in the biological and biosemiotic underpinnings of "Patterning" and "Languaging", to explore the nature and "timeless properties" of patterns as signs and their role in the emergence of human cognition and language from an evolutionary perspective. In particular I examine their involvement in 'habit taking'' in nature and its extension in culture, and in the coordination of unself-conscious action and creative processes, such as evoked by Christopher Alexander. The fact that patterns in their extended definition are omnipresent should not deter us and lead us to think that if everything is a pattern, nothing actually is… on the contrary. I will show how the development of a pattern literacy around patterns seen as basic units for the coordination of action and the understanding of the world can be used for the study of socio-ecological and socio-technological systems and provide insights on the way to design sustainable systems, and I will suggest how pattern languages could be understood and applied towards this objective.

This paper builds on work relating to pattern languages for social change, such as in the papers titled Fourth generation pattern languages-patterns as epistemic threads for systemic orientation, and Pattern Literacy in support of Systems Literacy presented to the Systems Science and Pattern Language communities between 2015 and 2017. It is part of an endeavor to bring pattern thinking and systems thinking, or pattern science and systems science, closer to each other, in order to further introduce pattern thinking and pattern language in the design, assessment and orientation of our socio-technological and socio-environmental systems, large or small, to better address the societal issues of our time. It complements several initiatives to put pattern languages at the service of sustainability and societal change, and to introduce pattern thinking and pattern language into systems thinking and systemic design. My broader aim is to enhance the innate patterning capability of human beings and thus an overall pattern literacy in support of systems literacy. Pattern literacy manifests our ability to grasp, learn, assemble, represent and mobilize patterns to make-sense of, converse about and shape our world(s). Systems literacy manifests our ability to interrogate and attempt to understand the relationships among systems wholes and parts, and the mechanisms that affect and shape our world(s), in part or as a whole. In this paper, I explore how a systemic approach to patterns and pattern language could support systemic inquiry and systemic design, and more generally the advancement of pattern language. In particular, I discuss the extension of the act of design to encompass the systemic inquiry that motivates a design and the ongoing monitoring of the fitness of a design to its intended purpose. I examine the multiple facets and understandings of the concept of pattern and show how they can be reconciled to include both the inquiry or observational/informational aspects and the design aspects of patterns in a larger systems framework. In this light, I reexamine the appropriateness of the pattern expressed in problem-solution form in the context of complex systems, and the notion of generativity, and I propose ways forward for extended definitions and pattern forms.

To understand and adapt to the world around us, and to collectively make decisions that can ensure its systemic health in the long run, we must get a grasp of how the systems that our designs generate actually behave and evolve, not only in their ‘mechanical’ aspects, but also in their psychological, relational, political, and existential dimensions. The skills that this requires may be thought of as Systems Literacy. Systems Literacy involves a set of ‘sensing’ and mediating capabilities that can help us identify, interconnect and make sense of weak signals of systemic behavior in growing volumes of information. This approach includes leveraging the complementarity of perspectives, knowledges, and know-hows across disciplines and domains of action, and helping us to enter in resonance with each other and our environment, in order for systemic coherence to emerge as a whole as a result of fragmented collective change efforts.
Because patterns are embedded in cognition, and are so essential for both discerning and designing form, we believe that the development of Pattern Literacy could beneficially support the enhancement of Systems Literacy. This paper explores the properties of patterns as units of systemic meaning-making and how these properties could be combined as a system to enhance pattern literacy and ultimately support the development of systems literacy.

Paper presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences - "Realizing Sustainable Futures" - University of Colorado – 23 - 30 July 2016. Soon to be published in the ISSS Journal – 60th meeting - Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-ND 4.0.

Working towards more sustainable systems is a critical endeavor of the 21st century requiring collaborative efforts for the broad development of systemic literacy. This paper explores the potential of patterns and pattern languages as tools for systemic change and transdisciplinary collaboration, investigation and design, and outlines the ways they could be further operationalized to develop and leverage collective intelligence and agency towards Curating the Emergence of Thrivability and Realizing Sustainable Futures in Socio-Ecological Systems.

Technology is what boosts the capacity of individuals and communities to become authors of their own stories, and what enables collective intelligence to become aware of itself and to fulfill its long awaited promise. It is also what can lock up potential inside black boxes for just a few to benefit from.

We are facing a paradox. It seems that at the same time as collective intelligence is making itself increasingly palpable and promising as a whole, the possibility of it being actionable locally and effectively enabling us to get ourselves out of a planetary predicament is becoming remote.

In this article, I look at how collective intelligence is being hindered or captured as it comes into being, with the threat of leaving us deprived from a significant source of latent agency, and I suggest what it would take to reclaim it back.

I build upon the Ecology for Transformative Action, which I set the stage for in the last issue of this journal, to examine the condition under which technology and systems dynamics can be turned towards the greater good, and how collective intelligence can be mobilized and operate as a force for systemic change. In particular, I explore further how a pattern language for systemic change regenerative of commons could be the means of expression of operationalized collective intelligence.

The purpose of this paper is to lay the ground for an open source pattern language for systemic transformation (PLAST) based on systemic interpretation. This pattern language will help change agents and practitioners on the ground make sense of complex systemic phenomena and dynamics so they can build truly transformative solutions and create greater coherence between disparate actions, thus leveraging and catalyzing agency and capacity for change wherever it may be found.

The end goal is to accelerate the transition to a sustainable and thrivable world, through the awareness and fostering of sustainable socio-economic dynamics regenerative of commons. Commons are understood here as the distributed factors of opportunity and renewal of the system, which need to be perpetually maintained to ensure the on-going sustainability and thrivability of the system and its components.

Paper prepared for the PurplSoc Workshop - Pursuit of Pattern Languages for Societal Change, at Danube-University, November 14/15, 2014

As our current system based on a growth-extraction spiral is leading us into the wall, we are seeing a multitude of innovative local solutions to local problems with people taking things inventively into their hands to construct alternatives in all kinds of domains. At the same time, new models are appearing at various levels and scales that address the challenges we are facing in more systemic ways.

A whole ecology for transformative action is waiting to be discovered and nurtured, with legions of change agents engaged in bringing about change or ready to do so…This article explores systemic change from a praxis and agency perspective, and the context and conditions for its unfolding. It examines the logics that underlie action, the dynamics, relationships, and processes involved, the role of social organization, leadership development, intercultural and inter-subjective communication, as well as possible leverage points.

This strategic inquiry draws on a variety of disciplines to suggest ways to amplify and accelerate the existing forces for change, and to advance on multiple fronts at once so that diverse efforts can coalesce and impacts can multiply.

This presentation examines engagement and the drivers for transformative action, and the conditions under which disparate efforts of all kinds can coalesce to generate systemic change and bring about a new paradigm generative of thrivability, sustainability and equity.
Challenging the assumption that open groups of change agents and activists can agree on the representation and materialization of a shared overarching vision, goals and priorities (even on the commons themselves!), it places itself in the context of an ecology for transformative action with its diversity, systems and processes, and examines a variety of forms of engagement under the lens of action logics.
Action logics are derived from leadership and psychological development theory, generally used in constructive developmental approaches. They reflect the affective, behavioral and cognitive modalities which drive people's thinking, experience and action.
In this presentation, action logics are applied horizontally as a meaning-making framework to understand the nature and processes of engagement and to examine what type of common underlying logic, and in particular of commons logic, could manifest as common ground across action logics.
Ultimately it opens up further areas of research and practical applications, and in particular the development of a pattern language and other tools for bringing to awareness the common ground elements that would help 'activate' and leverage agency wherever it can be found (and in particular in the mainstream) in a way that nurtures the commons at all levels and in all its dimensions.

An article in Lo Squaderno Explorations in Space and Society
No. 30 - Commons – Practices, boundaries and thresholds - December 2013.

In this article I challenge the definition of commons based on the nature of goods, addressing the topic from the perspective of experience: how commons are created or emerge from a process that intimately associates people and the participatory and mindful ways in which they produce, manage or care for their shared resources or assets. I also outline how the essential principles of a commons logic which is not only found in what activists typically calls ‘the comons’, could help amplify the action of other sustainability and social change initiatives in a way that can be geared towards growing the commons as a whole.

This comes ahead of a workshop that Wolfgang Hoeschele (book the Economy of Abundance) and I will be facilitating at the Conference of the Ostrom workshop in June with Joe Corneli and Bonnitta Roy. We plan to develop an approach to a systemic change process based on commons logic as transformative logic and a pattern language for designing appropriate structures and practices

In the context of the development of a core body of knowledge, an Integrative Systems Science, as foundation for Systems  Engineering:
Exploring the role of semiosis & patterns  in the emergence of human cognition & language from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Investigating the limits of language as coordination tool for addressing complexity & knowledge fragmentation; and the role of patterns in the development of knowledge inter-operability.
This is part of a broader doctoral research on Pattern Literacy in support of Systems Literacy.
Presented at the INCOSE International Workshop IW2020, at Torrance, CA, January 2020.

Exploring the role of semiosis & patterns  in the emergence of human cognition & language from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Investigating the limits of language as coordination tool for addressing complexity & knowledge fragmentation.
This is part of a broader doctoral research on Pattern Literacy in support of Systems Literacy.
Presented at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences - Oregon State University – Corvallis - June 2019

When dealing with complexity, we are confronted with a growing interdependence of factors, and intricacy of causes and effects. In particular, material, social and individual drivers and processes are increasingly entangled to produce the hidden patterns that underlie our socio-ecological and socio-technological systems at various levels, which may lock us into unethical and unsustainable systemic behavior. On the response side however, knowledge and forms of agency are ever more specialized and fragmented, locally influenced by a variety of paradigms, as well as conflicting forces.

More than ever, in order to make sense of our changing world and to respond to its challenges, we must be able to unpack the different dimensions of complexity across a variety of boundaries. To better achieve this, we must find ways to mobilize a plurality of forms of knowledge and action and to coalesce the ‘good thinking’ and ‘good forces’ for systemic change.

In this paper, I explore to what extend the development of a pattern literacy can serve the understanding, orientation and design of complex systems, while attempting to cross epistemological and ontological divides. In particular, I examine the role of patterns as decoding and encoding tools, and their potential to enable the breaking down and construction of architectures of meaning at various levels of granularity, starting from our perceptions of the world as we encounter and make sense of it, to the habits we take and behaviors we display as we interact with it, and finally to the more elaborate designs we unleash in the world intentionally or not, that may take a life of their own.  I then examine how the versatility and ‘plasticity’ of the concept of pattern and forms that patterns take, can help recursively decode and encode different views and perspectives of knowledge and reality both in understanding and design, and reflect on how patterns can be used in interpretive methods of inquiry and creative thinking to respond to the challenges I described above.

This was presented at the  63rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences - Oregon State University – Corvallis on June 28, 2019.

In this presentation, I explore the role of semiosis & patterns in the emergence of human cognition & language from an evolutionary biology perspective; and I Investigate the limits of language as coordination tool for addressing complexity & knowledge fragmentation.

This work is part of a broader doctoral research on Pattern Literacy in support of Systems Literacy.

I welcome feedback on the presentation before I finalize the paper and share it for comments as well. The  comment session is here: https://www.academia.edu/s/4510bed916/towards-pattern-literacy-the-biosemiotic-underpinnings-of-patterning-languaging?source=link

Thank you.

This paper builds on the work on Fourth generation pattern languages-patterns as epistemic threads for systemic orientation, presented at Purplsoc 2015, and Pattern Literacy in support of Systems Literacy presented at Plop 2017. In this paper, I explore how a systemic approach to patterns and pattern language can support the concept of an act of design expressed in broader terms than the conception-to-delivery of objects or projects to be designed. In particular, I propose to include patterns in an extension of the act of design: upstream to decode the context and forces that motivate or trigger a design, and downstream to encompass the behaviors generated by the design in interaction with other designs, as well as the effects the design may produce on initial contexts and behaviors. I consider action as an act of design. This involves expressing elements constitutive of contexts and driving forces, as well as outputs or outcomes of generative designs as sign/form patterns, embedded into the formulation of a pattern as guide for design. This is part of an endeavor to bring pattern thinking and systems thinking or pattern science and systems science closer to each other, in order to further introduce pattern thinking and pattern language in the design, assessment and orientation of our socio-technological and socio-environmental systems, large or small, to better address the societal issues of our time.