humanity – octopus.law.blog

In my previous post, I posed some questions on design which I’d now like to expand on:

How does ‘design’ relate to social reality? And can we proactively ‘design’ our social reality so that it works better for us?

What is design?

Without looking at the myriad definitions or conceptions of ‘design’ which are no doubt already out there, I think design is:

Planning something with the intention that it has an effect.

In academic philosophy people propose, adjust and debate definitions all the time. We want a good definition of a word to identify precisely what it is we’re talking about when we use that word. A definition should be broad enough to include all the different things we might use the word for. But at the same time, we don’t want the word to mean absolutely anything. So a definition should also be narrow enough that it only includes the relevant things, and excludes everything else. Philosophers tend to road-test definitions by checking whether they’re broad enough and narrow enough to suit the intended purpose of the word.

So in that vein, how good is our definition of design?

This definition looks suitably broad, because it includes a lot of things which we might consider ‘edge cases’ or ‘borderline cases’ of design. It includes things which aren’t ideal or perfect cases of design, but which we would still want to call design. Here are some examples.

Things included by our definition of design

Purposefully bad design. Some excellent examples of this can be found here. These objects are painful to imagine using because they undermine their own functionality. They are plans for objects, drawn up with the intention that the objects will have some effect. It just so happens that, in these cases, the effect would be pretty infuriating.

Designs that fail. Our definition doesn’t say that the planned thing succeeds in having the intended effect, so it allows for cases where we’d want to say that the design failed, or was unsuccessful. You might design a footbridge which unintentionally wobbles disconcertingly from side to side. Or you might design a company rebrand which unintentionally leads to widespread mockery.

Designs never implemented. Our definition doesn’t require anything to be built or made real; it only requires something to be planned. Therefore, it accommodates all cases where designs for something are worked on but never implemented; where something has been designed but never built or realised. All over the world, wax crayon designs for rockets sit pinned to fridges, showcasing glorious vehicles which may never be rode into space.

As that example of rockets on fridges starts to highlight, our definition of design is general enough to allow ‘design’ to take place in any field or profession, in application to anything. It doesn’t specify who must do the designing – it could be a qualified designer or a pre-schooler, a robot or a cat (provided they can sufficiently plan and have intentions). It includes everything from an architect producing a blueprint of a proposed high-rise to a child dreaming up their perfect rollercoaster.

Given that it accommodates all of these different things we’d happily call ‘design’, our definition looks suitably broad. Now let’s see if it’s suitably narrow, by checking it excludes everything we want it to.

Things excluded by our definition of design

Planning something without intending it to have any effect.

Imagine planning to go and paint a wall. You plan it by choosing a wall, a day, and buying some paint. But you don’t intend your painting of the wall to have any effect. This doesn’t seem like something we’d want to call ‘design’.

One might argue that there is an element of design in the choice of paint. However, for the purpose of the example, you’re choosing the paint without any intention of your painting affecting things. So you’re not choosing the paint thinking ‘this colour will brighten someone’s day’ or ‘this will adhere best to the wall’. Rather, you’re entirely lacking intention when it comes to what your painting will achieve. You might as well pick a paint at random. We can say the same for all other choices in how you go about painting the wall; choice of brush, type of stroke, number of coats. If there’s absolutely no intention behind any of these choices, it seems right to say that there’s no ‘design’ happening.

One might object that the example isn’t a plausible one, because whenever we make any kind of choice in the course of planning something, we will inevitably have some sliver of intention that our action or choice will have some effect.

But this objection doesn’t threaten our definition of design, because the definition continues to work well once we adjust the example to make it plausible. Let’s accept that there will always be some sliver of intention behind your choices about how you paint the wall. It still seems as though there is more design happening the more you intend the painting to have a particular effect. For example, if you were to plan to paint the wall in yellow, intending that this would serve the dual purpose of complementing the colour of nearby houses and also being more visible to traffic in the dark, this seems to involve ‘design’ much more than simply picking yellow at random. If, in the first case, someone were to ask why the wall had been painted yellow, you could say ‘it was designed to complement the houses and increase visibility’. But if the yellow were picked at random, it would make more sense to say ‘there was no design to it, it was just picked at random.’

As such, it’s a virtue of our definition that it excludes planning something without intending it to have an effect.

Making or doing something intended to have an effect, but without planning it.

An example of this could be picking up some litter you notice, and popping it in the bin to keep the street tidy. You’ve done something with the intention to have an effect (the path will look less messy, and the piece of litter will be collected). But it does seem strange to say that this involved ‘design’. It makes more sense to say that no ‘designing’ happened; only action.

However, if you had instead planned a day litter picking with the intention of making the streets look less messy and ensuring the litter was collected, it would make more sense to say that your actions or your day were ‘designed’ to achieve this.

Even if you don’t think that it’s plausible to eradicate every ounce of planning from an action with intention, we can make the same sort of point we made above. Even accepting that there is always unavoidably some element of planning, it seems that there is more design happening whenever there is more planning happening. So if an artist meticulously plans out a performance with the intention that it makes an audience reflect on mortality, that very much seems like design. But if an artist improvises a performance on the spot, even with the same intention, this looks like something done more by impulse than design.

So it seems to be another virtue of our definition that it excludes anything that doesn’t involve some degree of planning.

What is the point of all this?

Good question. Why labour over getting a good definition of ‘design’ established?

In general, a clear and accurate definition of something can show us how that thing connects up with the rest of the world. It’s like getting the full job description of a word or concept, rather than just the job title. Fleshing out this full job description can prompt us to challenge assumptions we may hold, and help us begin to think in a fresh way, opening up new questions and ideas. It can also help us to see how a word or concept might apply to different degrees or extents, rather than being something that’s either applicable or not in a binary manner. And if the word or concept is indeed not binary, but more blurry, then fleshing out a definition can help us establish a paradigm case of that word or concept. We can then distinguish the paradigm case – the most ideal, pure or perfect instance of the thing – from all of the more messy cases that differ from the paradigm in various ways.

Recognising these various shades of the thing can enable us to see the dimensions along which something can be more or less like the paradigm. We saw this above, in the way that more intention and more planning produced something that seemed more like design. In this way, fleshing out a definition can provide us with a toolkit for engineering or dismantling the thing we’re defining. Once we know the key components that make a thing tick, we know what we need to build and fine-tune to bring about the paradigm, and we know what we need to impair and destroy to erode and eradicate the paradigm.

So definitions in general are great, but why define design in particular? Last post I wrote about what I’m calling ‘social reality’; the things we humans bring to the world through our conventions and behaviour, that cannot exist independently of us, such as institutions, laws, borders and money. I said:

I think most of our screw-ups are the result of our social reality distorting our view of actual reality, or at least becoming dangerously uncoupled from it.

I’m interested in defining design because I suspect that most of our social reality is very poorly designed or not designed at all. I think it is this lack or absence of good design which has allowed our social reality to go off the rails and become decoupled from actual reality, resulting in many of our biggest screw ups. I also think that redesigning our social reality, to bring it back into alignment or harmony with actual reality, might be a promising way of rectifying our screw ups and preventing further ones.

I’ve already inflated this post far beyond what it was intended to be. You could say I designed it badly. So I’m going to end with further questions to follow up on:

To what extent has our social reality been actively designed and constructed, and to what extent has it just emerged? If there has been an element of design, how successful has it been?
To what extent do we passively imbibe social reality, and to what extent do we play a more active and participatory role in creating it? Is there a clear line to be drawn here, or is it more blurry? (Thanks Ed)
What constitutes good, successful design when it comes to designing social reality? What difference does it make to social reality? Can it be realistically achieved? If so, how?

All comments welcomed, and if you can recommend any relevant books, articles, sites, podcasts, etc, please let me know.

Why octopus.law.blog?

I have some clusters of ideas and questions bubbling around in my head. I’d love to explore them and build upon them further, but I’m concerned that I won’t manage to do this in any real way unless I begin funneling them into something more creative and constructive. So I’ve decided to write a blog. It’s not the first time I’ve decided to write a blog, and it might not be the last. It’s called octopus.law.blog because, when such a URL is available, it must be used.

So, what are the ideas and questions bubbling around?

Accidents of History

The overarching and general question is: how have we ended up here? How have we humans ended up being as we are and doing what we do? From the little I’ve read so far, it’s clear that much of what we take for granted in the way we live and work has come about more by accident than by design. I want to understand more about the accidents of history which have landed us where we are. Hopefully, this might help us work out how we unpick ourselves from some of the more knotty and undesirable accidents, and how we might engineer things differently so that we can have more happy accidents in future.

Social Reality

I’m particularly interested in ‘social reality’. I’m using ‘social reality’ very broadly, to mean everything we humans bring to the world by convention or behaviour, such as money, laws and corporations. Unlike planets, sticks and atoms – which exist regardless of what us humans are up to, and would be here even if we’d never existed – money, laws and corporations only exist because we humans collectively behave in certain ways. A £5 note wouldn’t be money if ATMs didn’t dispense them and no shops accepted them. And laws wouldn’t exist if there were no courts, no police, and no agreed consequences whatsoever for any sort of action.

I think many of the ways in which we humans have gone awry, many of the bad historical accidents we’ve undergone, have resulted from our social reality distorting our view of actual reality. I think this is why we allow people to die of cold and hunger while others hoard immense wealth. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘not having enough money’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘not having enough food or shelter to survive’. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘countries with borders’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘where humans can physically move freely’.

Most pressingly, we’ve allowed the social reality of ‘economic growth’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘how we use and manage our resources’. The economics of our social reality has blinded us to the environmental limitations of our actual reality, and so we’ve severely mismanaged our resources.

Our resource management has been tailored to an economic social reality where infinite growth is possible, resources aren’t finite and there are no environmental impacts. In actual reality, none of those things are the case. It’s like we’ve been playing by the rules of poker, but the game has been chess all along. And unsurprisingly, that means we’re losing at chess.

To zoom out again: I think most of our screw-ups are the result of our social reality distorting our view of actual reality, or at least becoming dangerously uncoupled from it.

Isn’t that obvious / trivial?

I realise there is a sense in which it is totally trivial to say that social reality is the source of our screw-ups. Because our screw-ups must be things we humans are responsible for bringing to the world, and if ‘social reality’ is broadly defined as pretty much anything we bring to the world which can’t exist independently of us, then of course our screw-ups will have a basis in social reality.

That is indeed trivial, and I’m trying to say something more specific. It’s not just that our screw-ups have a basis in social reality. It’s that the screw-ups happen when our social reality becomes decoupled from our actual reality, becomes misaligned with it, or maybe even outright contradicts it. In other words, our major screw ups happen when our social reality fails to respect actual reality. They happen when we get too big for our boots, and forget that our human endeavours will always, sooner or later, bump up against cold hard reality. They happen when we delude ourselves that the world is exactly as we think it is, rather than something much larger and more complex that we only have a narrow and selective perspective upon.

It may seem odd to think that our screw-ups are due to, essentially, a failure to understand the world. We have mastered the scientific method as a means of deepening our understanding, enough that we have been able to make great leaps in technology and medicine. Isn’t our understanding pretty good?

I think it’s very telling that we don’t find the scientific method, or even just empirical observation, being employed much outside of laboratories and academic institutions. When was the last time someone at work made a decision based on extremely scant evidence, or none at all? Or neglected to properly observe actual outcomes so that those observations could inform future decisions? When was the last time a government implemented policy which wasn’t adequately researched or evidenced? This happens all the time. It is remarkable how little, in the ways we live and work, we properly observe how something is panning out, and then make adjustments informed by what we’ve observed.

To ‘properly’ observe and adjust is important, because we are subject to an array of cognitive biases that skew and distort the way we perceive and react to the world. So even when we’re doing our best to observe and adjust, if we’re not mitigating for our cognitive biases, we’re likely to be observing patterns that aren’t really there, searching for evidence that supports our already held beliefs, and making unfounded assumptions about the best actions going forward.

Given all of this, it’s not surprising that our social reality of institutions, companies, laws, economics, etc, could have become dangerously decoupled from actual reality, in ways we’re not always aware of.

So there’s the main question I’m interested in pursuing: are humanity’s major screw-ups due to social reality becoming decoupled from actual reality? And if so, what are the implications? How can we avoid the decoupling, and keep our social reality better aligned with actual reality?

As a first step, I’ll read John Searle’s book The Construction of Social Reality.

I’ll end for now by calling out some other things I’m interested in exploring:

How does ‘design’ relate to social reality? And can we proactively ‘design’ our social reality so that it works better for us?
I suspect that we agree on more than we think, in terms of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. What we disagree on is how to get to the things we agree are good, like fairness, safety, and security. Is this true or not? And either way, what are the implications?
I suspect the biggest failures of social reality occur when it becomes easier for us to do bad things than it is to do good things. If this is true, then we could improve things greatly by making bad things hard to do and good things easy to do. Is there promise in this, or is it naive?

If you can recommend any relevant books, articles, sites, podcasts, etc, please let me know.