Using an information processing architecture as an aid to optimising technology choice for faecal wastes and domestic waste water:
Part II – Human complexity

Introduction

For a social animal utilising Nature in technologies that require effort and resources to develop, then it is desirable that these resources are used to develop the ‘best possible technology’. The first question therefore is what is the best technology? Part I of this series considered the optimisation of the Nature side of this question while this paper attempts to make sense of the human complexity side of the question. The interactions between Parts I & II are formulated into a set of tools that need their own paper (Chapman, 2014c).

The context for these papers is sustainability, or more particularly the use of limited resources to maintain them for future generations. For sewerage these resources are: water, nutrients and energy; with public health as an overarching requirement of the system. Consequently, sustainability necessitates consideration of our place in the biosphere and how we handle the water, nutrient and energy flows that are processed through our sewerage technologies.

Humans have developed a number of social organizational forms to manage the complexity of society’s functioning. One of these, commerce, produces the technologies that we use for dealing with our sewage. In contrast, our institutions are given legal powers to moderate human behaviours in favour of sustainable choices. Any notion of an optimum technology must occur within this legal/commercial framework.

The approach taken here to make sense of this complexity is to utilize the existing organizational forms, in particular: a community’s location and size, regulatory institutions and commerce, and embed their behaviour patterns within the information realm. In the information realm each entity can be considered a semi-autonomous unit with interconnections to other units. As we can understand the behaviour characteristics of each entity by observation, then the focus can move towards the interconnections between the participants.

Two particularly useful interconnections that get information into an individual’s awareness are language linkages where what is possible is synonymous with the Beacon, and economic linkages by which individuals adopting sustainable technologies can be ‘rewarded’.

In addition, the creativity that occurs at boundaries (a characteristic that is familiar to artists and consequently humans have empathy for), can be considered alongside the use of the more formal mechanisms in the interconnections.

The paper finishes with the use of information to resolve constraints which results in a path through information space towards what might be called the optimum location in information space from which the best possible technology is more likely to arise.