Definition of Tendencies

What are Tendencies?

What draws a system, a material, or even a person to act in one way rather than another? In creative practice, a tendency is not a fixed trait or a preordained path, but something like a statistical pull—a propensity for a system to settle into certain patterns, actions, or outcomes over others. Tendencies are the subtle, often invisible, regularities that shape what emerges, how, and with what likelihood. They are not laws, but leanings; not rules, but drifts; not destinies, but inclinations that arise from the dynamic interplay of constraints, affordances, histories, and environment.

A tendency is the emergent bias of a dynamic system—human, material, or ecological—towards particular patterns of action or states of being. It is not a thing, but a relational process: an outcome of how components (tools, bodies, habits, environments, histories) interact, constrain, and enable each other as a configuration. In creative processes, tendencies often first manifest as the “usual ways” things unfold, the grooves worn by repetition, habit, and structure. Yet, these grooves are never absolute; they are statistical regularities, not certainties. A tendency expresses what is more likely to happen, not what must happen.

‍

See also: Propensities (below), Dispositif, Configurations, Epicycles, Feedforward