I once read a story about NASA engineers working on one of the first research satellites. They spent a long time trying to design a motorized system to deploy the solar panels that would power the satellite. Every solution they came up with was too complicated, too big, or required batteries that were too heavy.
An outside engineer, looking at the plans, said “what if we didn’t do anything?”
After all, the satellite would be spinning. And as it turned out, the spin provided plenty of kinetic energy to deploy the panels.
Small, simple transformations have the benefit of being cheap, uncomplicated, and fairly easy to put into motion. They also don’t generate the resistance that large-scale, complicated, or expensive transformations often create.
Arguing that taking small, sequential steps that unfold into each other is far more productive than trying to create a comprehensive solution all at once, Christopher Alexander put it this way: “The unfolding process allows you to go one step at a time, precisely because it is based on a sequence which permits this without disturbing or screwing up the whole.”
In the satellite example, the small first step was simply to ask “what is the condition of the satellite at the moment the panels must deploy?” And the most elegant solution unfolded from there.
SEE ALSO
Nature of Order, Book Two The Process of Creating Life, p. 317 Christopher Alexander
Small islands of coherence have the ability to shift the entire system Making Sense in Incoherent Times
Jesus and the mustard seed Start Small
