A Black Box is a system or process where all you see is:
- Input – The things that affects the black box.
- Output – The things that the black box produces or affects.
This implies two things:
- That you sometimes don’t know what happen within a system, even though you know what effects it produces.
- That you sometimes don’t need to know how something works on the inside to interact with it on a meaningful level.
Whether used with intention or not, a black box symbolizes and represents hidden knowledge and the unmeasured parts of systems. Everything that is unmeasured or uncertain but happens anyways can thus be thought of as a Black Box.