Patterns, Complexity and the Lingua Democratica: Introducing a Pattern-Oriented Approach to Complexity

Interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary research is becoming more common and their importance is increasingly being recognized. However, in practice many of these efforts tend to end up in more or less isolated activities around a common theme. Successful forms of cross-domain interactions may be feasible as long as the stakeholders that team up around a certain research theme share a common vocabulary. However, the risk of fragmentation becomes greater when they have little in common and so cross-domain research that involves contributions from the hard sciences and the humanities are relatively rare. Besides a willingness to be open for each other’s contributions, one of the biggest challenges for the success of such efforts is to find a common vocabulary that can be recognized and shared by all the parties involved. Such a vocabulary could contribute to a lingua democratica, a consensual and cooperative means of sharing knowledge amongst domains. This paper aims to draw attention to the concept of patterns and pattern libraries as means to create such shared vocabularies. A number of patterns, based on the concept of feedback, will be introduced from the often very abstract research area of computational intelligence and related areas. These patterns aim to transform and condense some essential characteristics of feedback in such a way that, hopefully, they may become more or less accessible for other scientific disciplines. The resulting ‘pattern-oriented approach to complexity’ (PAC) aims to address the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of complexity, not by cross-domain criticism, but rather by attempting to achieve certain synthesis