Example: ant pheromone paths

Within ants, there can be a path left for others to follow, but what about natural paths in our environment that influence us to take them because of the idea of the "path of least resistence" or the effects of having paved cow paths.

Similarly being lead by "the company that you keep".

relathionship to research on hanging out with fat people tending to make one fatter.

Unlike prior (oral) efforts, Gottfried van Swieten created a writtten set of instructions for cataloging texts at the Austrian National Library. This helped to minimize coordination issues as well as time to teach and perfect the system.

Written rules, laws, and algorithms help to create self-organization. This is done by saving time and energy that would have gone into the work of directed building of a system instead. The saved work can then be directed towards something else potentially more productive or regenerative.

William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a British pioneer in the fields of cybernetics and systems theory. He is best known for proposing the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, intelligence amplification, the good regulator theorem, building the automatically stabilizing Homeostat, and his books Design for a Brain (1952) and An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).

This likely applies to other areas of design as well.