Natural systems, like all systems, have their own unique requirements for sustenance and stability. In the short-term, a jungle needs water, nutrients and sunlight to sustain itself as a healthy living system. For its long-term stability, that is, its ability to maintain the crucial balance between stagnation and chaos that enables it to remain a jungle, a jungle needs internal regulators that are resilient in the face of broader changes in the climate, encroachment of new species, etc.
Significantly, the natural forces we can find at work in a jungle are no less present in a garden. Indeed, if we fail to look after a garden’s stability and sustenance needs as part of the plant kingdom, providing water and sunlight, for example, it will fade or die. In this sense, a garden is as much a natural system as a jungle is. Unlike a jungle, however, what goes on in a garden cannot be explained solely by appeal to the workings of nature because a garden is also an artifact. It is a human creation, a jungle upon which a design of uniquely human origin has been imposed. Any particular characteristics or requirements it may have that arise from it being a garden rather than a jungle (tilling, weeding, fertilizing, etc.) find no origin or criteria in nature. Rather, they are utterly human. And if we fail to look after a garden’s stability and sustenance needs as an artifact, it will revert all too quickly to the state of nature from which it was drawn. Accordingly, any satisfactory explanation of the form and function of a garden requires appeal to the requirements of nature and to the requirements of its design as an artifact.
This is true of all artifacts. Whether gardens or cities, tools or technologies, automobiles or the Internet, all human creations are a mixture of natural materials and human purposes, and both aspects demand our attention. A bridge must be understood equally in terms of the functions its design affords, and the properties of its raw materials that afford its design (Cook and Brown, 1999). One the one hand, the form a particular bridge takes can by keyed to the functions of spanning a particular distance, supporting a range of loads, etc. On the other hand, its form needs to be accounted for in terms of what the bridge is made of. A bridge built to serve a specific set of requirements for span and load would look quite different if its raw materials were different - stone would afford one range of design possibilities, steel another.
Because such systems are artifacts, and because their forums and functions cannot be adequately explained in terms of the properties of natural systems alone, I call them “artifactual” systems. (I prefer this term to “man-made” since it is gender-neutral, and to “artificial” because that can suggest “phony,” which artifactual systems clearly are not. “Artifactual” is also meant to remind us that such systems are human creations.)
As human beings, we interact not only with nature and our artifacts but also with one another. This includes all forms of intra-human interaction, from dialogue to teamwork to organizational behavior to the modes of discourse and forms of activity necessary to vital public life. That aspect of human interaction that is distinct from the mediation of natural or artificial systems is what can be understood, following Vickers (1996 [orig. 1965]; 1983), as the workings of “human systems.” If I communicate with you by yelling across a field or speaking over the telephone or sending an email over the Internet, there are natural and artifactual systems that afford our communication. But they alone cannot account for the meaning of what we say or for the net of expectations that the communication fulfills or for the value that we place on what is said. All of that transpires within a human system that you and I share, that we most likely inherited from any common social groups to which we belong and from human culture in general. We may speak over the telephone, but we communicate with each other. The success of our communication is at least as much dependent upon the presence and stability of a set of human norms that make our communication meaningful and actionable, as it is on the clarity of the signal carried through the telephone.
Human systems entail those standards that give form and direction to human activity, particularly, our aesthetic and moral values; they are unique among systems in that they have an axiological dimension. The actions we take and the choices we make reflect our values. They can also be seen in what we do with respect to all three kinds of systems. How we shape or despoil nature, what artifacts we decide to create and how we design and use them, and the ways we treat one another all testify to what we consider worth doing and which ways of doing them we find appealing or desirable. In explaining the form a garden takes we necessarily refer to those values of distinctly human character that have been incorporated into the garden’s design: the aesthetic traditions that enable us to distinguish an English garden from a Japanese one, and by which we judge one garden to be modest and another world-class (for a parallel exposition of systems and ethics, see Cook, 2005).
In this sense, a bridge is not merely a static physical object. Just as an understanding of its design must include the affordances of its material, it must also include the values of its designers. Why it is built and located where it is, why it enables some forms of traffic and not others, why public funds are committed to a grand appearance when a more modest bridge could have the same carrying capacity, all these must appeal to the workings of the human systems within which the bridge is conceived, built and maintained. Conversely, no adequate explanation of why the bridge has the particular physical dimensions and properties it does can be given without reference to the values and purposes of the human systems in which it came to be. A bridge, like all artifacts, is the product and the embodiment of natural, artifactual, and human systems.
This distinction among these three kinds of systems finds a reinforcing parallel in the distinctions Hannah Arendt (1998 [orig. 1958]) draws among labor, work and action in her examination of human activity. Indeed, Arendt describes the whole of human activity as made up of those three distinct forms. In each case, I would apply her focused treatment of activity to the broader notion of systems.
Labor for Arendt is that part of human activity that confers to maintaining ourselves as biological beings. “Labor,” Arendt says, “is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor.” (Arendt, 1998, 7) Seemingly, at the individual level this would at minimum include getting food and drink, protecting ourselves from the elements, and dodging predators. On such group levels as a community or even the species, it would include activities like adapting to the local environment and reproducing. All this constitutes a complex of interconnected and interdependent activities, which we share to one degree or another with other species. These activities are part of the biological world, and as such are part of nature. Labor, then, is that aspect of human activity that is given over to maintaining ourselves as natural systems.
Work, as Arendt defines it, is concerned with bringing about and sustaining the “world of things, [that is] distinctly different from all natural surroundings.” (Arendt, 1998, 7) That is to say, work brings about the world of artifacts. These artifacts are distinctly human (other species may make things, but they do not make human things), which is to say they are the result of human purposes imposed upon nature.