Applying Beauty to Systems Architecting

A Perspective on Systems Thinking, Architecting, and Art: Part 2

By Tom McDermott & Alejandro Salado

Elegance and beauty are attributes commonly employed in the arts to describe artistic pieces. However, the practices of engineering, sciences, business, and other analytical disciplines have become so procedural that system architects in these domains no longer pursue elegance in a technical sense.

Some tech leaders have long claimed that the focus on procedures and processes instead of on elegance is one of the causes for the development and delivery of unsuccessful (or poor) systems. In the arts, elegance is a subjective concept. Yet, it is known that master painters employ a set of rules to leverage effective complexity to construct artistic pieces that are interpreted as elegant or beautiful by the human brain.

Research has shown that elegance and effective complexity are also correlated in systems architecture. Systems architects also resort to rules, called heuristics, that guide the structural form and the dynamic behavior of an architecture to reduce its complexity. A study compared the sets of rules in the arts and in systems architecture and identified two sets of strategies that were employed by master artists and systems architects to achieve elegance:  

1. Noise-Killing strategies (NK): Subtract details to get the whole; Use symmetry to structure experience; Use lists and groups; and Split information at different levels.
2. Meaning-Adding strategies (MA): Emphasize the differences over the averages; Remix and reconnect; Exploit the power of the center; and Use contrast and balance.

In the arts, “if one relies on NK strategies alone the experience is oversimplified and its interpretation becomes dull and trivial; conversely, too intense use of MA strategies makes a representation overwhelming and unnecessary complex”. In systems architecture, NK strategies address the simplification of a complex concept or system to its essential core constructs; whereas MA strategies represent the complexity of the system by highlighting the interaction of those constructs.

Therefore, research shows that master painters and systems architects leverage similar techniques to manage effective complexity and create elegant products. Yet, education in fine arts versus technical and management disciplines often follow distinct paths, with each discipline targeting different sets of skills and competences, which are developed or acquired using substantially different instructional approaches.

View Part 1 of this series here.