Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center—at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax. Some small parks or squares are virtually all center, and get their intricacy from minor differences at their peripheries.

The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping

The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between activities on campus that were already established.