Design is organizing complexity.

In his 2011 book Exposing the Magic of Design, Jon Kolko codifies the process by which designers synthesize vast amounts of complex information. It’s a practical endeavor, grounded in the need to make sense of overwhelming complexity.

Scientists like Murray Gell-Mann, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kauffman have observed that biological, social, and technological systems become increasingly interconnected and interdependent over time, leading to emergent complexity. Similarly, futurists like Ray Kurzweil argue that technological advancements are accelerating at an exponential rate, creating ever-greater complexity in how humans interact with machines and the world. Kurzweil predicts a future “singularity,” a point where this complexity surpasses human capacity to fully understand or control it.

You don’t need to be a scientist or futurist to recognize the increasing complexity of the world—you just need to own a smartphone. The internet and digital communication have inundated us with an overwhelming flow of information, straining our cognitive and decision-making abilities.

Kolko succinctly captures this challenge, noting: “Designers continually describe their profession as a way of organizing complexity or finding clarity in an overwhelming amount of data.” He argues that a designer’s ability to synthesize complexity is crucial for deriving insights that lead to “novel, useful, and appropriate designs.” Whether it’s contextual research data—like photographs, video clips, transcripts, requirements lists, and other artifacts—or mental models that shape our understanding of the world, such as the Copernican model of the solar system (placing the Sun at the center) versus the Ptolemaic model (placing Earth at the center), design serves as a means of creating order from chaos.

This theme of design as a tool for taming and understanding complexity arises repeatedly. In a future post, I’ll explore Don Norman’s observation that the purpose of “good” design is to make complex things understandable.