MetaModernism and Incremental Development
Computer software is an attempt to apply rigorous logic to real-world problems. And guess what, it’s difficult! Very difficult! If this difficulty reflects the general problem of applying theory to reality then we may all have something to learn from the way software development has itself developed over the years.
The primary technique today seems to be incremental development, where all elements of a systems design and implementation are held to be tentative with an expectation that they may adapt in some way based on feedback. Developers create basic outlines for the features they would like to see and then attempt to implement them while collecting feedback from the real-world, including end users, that then informs future updates to the software’s design and implementation. They are discouraged from designing the whole system up front, implementing it all, and then releasing it to the users. This method, called “waterfall method”, is famously error prone and can lead to death march types of failure modes where huge amounts of resources may be wasted on a system that does not serve real user’s needs.
Perhaps the MetaModern world will become a world where conventions are iteratively developed, tested, redesigned, and developed again in adaptive ways. How the users will react to conventions that are in the process of being created and where the iterative development will ultimately lead may not be knowable in advance, however, this approach may tend towards conventions that take into account a large amount of real-world information and that meet actual needs that are co-discovered by both designers and consumers of the conventions.
