5 The Concept of “Intentional Arrangement”

Intentional arrangement emphasizes explicit or implicit acts of organization by people, or by computational processes acting as proxies for, or as implementations of, human intentionality. Intentional arrangement is easiest to see in Organizing Systems created by individual people who can make all the necessary decisions about organizing their own resources. It is also easy to see in Organizing Systems created by institutions like libraries, museums, businesses, and governments where the responsibility and authority to organize is centralized and explicit in policies, laws, or regulations.

However, top-down intentionality is not always necessary to create an Organizing system. Organization can emerge over time via collective behavior in situations without central control when decisions made by individuals, each acting intentionally, create traces, records, or other information that accumulates over time. Organizing systems that use bottom-up rather than top-down mechanisms are sometimes called self-organizing, because they emerge from the aggregated interactions of actors with resources or with each other. Self-organizing systems can change their internal structure or their function in response to feedback or changed circumstances.

This definition is broad enough to include business and biological ecosystems, traffic patterns, and open-source software projects. Another good example of emergent organization involves path systems, where people (as well as ants and other animals) can follow and thereby reinforce the paths taken by their predecessors. When highly orderly and optimal arrangements emerge from local interactions among ants, bees, birds, fish, and other animal species, it is often called “swarm intelligence.” When this happens with human ratings for news stories, YouTube videos, restaurants, and other types of digital and physical resources we call it “crowdsourcing.” What the animal and human situations have in common is that information is being communicated between individuals. Sometimes this communication is direct, as when Amazon shows you the average rating for a book or what books have been bought by people like you. At other times the communication is indirect, achieved when the agents modify their environment (as they do when they create paths) and others can respond to these modifications. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is another example where individuals collectively generate an outcome they did not directly intend but that arose from their separate self-interested actions as they respond to price signals in the marketplace. Likewise, even though there is no top-down organization, the web as a whole, with its more than a trillion unique pages, is a self-organizing system that at its core follows clear organizing principles.^[1][2][3]

The requirement for intentional arrangement excludes naturally occurring patterns created by physical or geological processes from being thought of as Organizing Systems. There is information in the piles of debris left after a tornado or tsunami and the strata of the Grand Canyon. But they are not Organizing Systems because the patterns of arrangement were created by deterministic natural forces rather than by agents following one or more organizing principles. On the other hand, collections of geological data like the measurements of chemical composition from different strata and locations in the Grand Canyon are Organizing Systems. Decisions about what to measure, how to combine and analyze the measurements, and any theories that are tested or created, reflect intentional arrangement of the data by the geologist.

Other patterns of resource arrangements are illusions or perceptions that require a particular vantage point. The best examples are patterns of stars as they appear to an observer on Earth. The three precisely aligned stars, often described as “Orion’s belt,” are hundreds of light years from Earth, and also from each other. The perceived arrangement of the stars is undeniable, but the stars are not aligned in the universe. Astronomical constellations like Orion are intentional arrangements imposed on our perceived locations of the stars, and these perceived arrangements and the explanations for them that constellations provide, form an Organizing System that is deeply embedded in human culture and in the practice of celestial navigation over the seas.

Taken together, the intentional arrangements of resources in an Organizing System are the result of decisions about what is organized, why it is organized, how much it is organized, when it is organized, and how or by whom it is organized (each of these will be discussed in greater detail in Design Decisions in Organizing Systems). An Organizing System is defined by the composite impact of the choices made on these design dimensions. Because these questions are interrelated their answers come together in an integrated way to define an Organizing System.