Los modelos de agentes individuales y los juegos de mesa socio-ecológicos (reales y virtuales) han demostrado ser herramientas poderosas para ayudar a distintos actores del medio rural a comprender, navegar y transformar para bien los complejos procesos en los que viven.
Ashby's law of requisite variety states that a controller must have at least as much variety (complexity) as the controlled. Maturana and Varela proposed autopoiesis (self-production) to define living systems. Living systems also require to fulfill the law of requisite variety. A measure of autopoiesis has been proposed as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment. Self-organization can be used as a concept to guide the design of systems towards higher values of autopoiesis, with the potential of making technology more "living", i.e.