BASIC Framework

“No one, to the day of my graduation, had ever taught me to look understandingly at a painting, or a tree, or the facade of a building.”
— George F. Kennan, Memoirs

Dan Klyn and The Understanding Group (TUG) developed this BASIC framework to help people see the architecture of any complex product, service, or system. It’s based on Dan’s research into the spatiality of meaning and uses simplified concepts of physical structures to help participants in a workshop or dialogue ask the kinds of questions that help identify significant architectural elements and influences in the environments they seek to change.

A poster explaining the elements of BASIC

BASIC: Boundaries, Associations, Situations, Invariants, and Cycles

Five Ways to See the Architecture of Complex Systems

The five vantage points to consider when examining the architecture of a complex system are:

  1. Boundaries—What things are: Absence, border, collision, edge, gap, graft, joint, rift, seam, transition.
    Where does one thing stop and another start? Why does the boundary exist in this way? Who gets to move the boundaries? Are there traces of where things were before?

  2. Associations—How things connect: Allusion, antecedence, connotation, entailment, hetero/homogeneity, metaphor, progenesis.
    What things do we associate with other things? What associations are direct? What are more diffuse? What is the basis upon which the belonging of something is predicated?

  3. Situations—Where things are: Adjacency, down-ness, emplacement, juxtaposition, nesting, up-ness.
    Why is anything located in one place relative to anything else? How does changing the placement of something change its meaning or purpose?

  4. Invariants—The constant forces: Entropy, friction, gravity, history.
    What doesn’t change or doesn’t seem to change? What are the most powerful forces in a given context or situation?

  5. Cycles—Variable forces: Demand, fashion, season, supply.
    How do these variable forces relate to those that are invariant? What elements are latent or redundant to address forces that are not currently detectable?

Thumbnail of BASIC poster downloads

Get In Touch

If you would like some assistance utilizing Klyn’s BASIC framework to see the architecture of a complex system that you’re working on, please contact us.