Dark Matter and Trojan Horses. A Strategic Design Vocabulary.

Dan Hill

33 annotations Jan 2023 – Mar 2023 data

dh_0

  • There is good failure and bad failure. The former is failure that enables a system to learn, becoming more resilient, more adept. The latter is exhibited within a non-learning system. Are these non-learning systems due to their fundamentally out-of-control characteristics, systems whose complexity has grown beyond our comprehension and capability? Or is it simply that policy is too dislocated from its realisation?

dh_1

  • Design has too often been deployed at the low value end of the product spectrum, putting the lipstick on the pig. In doing this, design has failed to make the case for its core value, which is addressing genuinely meaningful, genuinely knotty problems by convincingly articulating and delivering alternative ways of being. Rethinking the pig altogether, rather than worrying about the shade of lipstick it's wearing.
  • "When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises. Hence on the one hand the importance of questions, and on the other, of the resourcefulness of attitude that prompts them." (Norman Potter, 1969)
  • In strategic design, synthesis suggests resolving into a course of action, whereas analysis suggests a presentation of data. Analysis tells you how things are, at least in theory, whereas synthesis suggests how things could be.
  • In The Social Animal (2011), David Brooks suggests the persistent failure of policy-making is because of this preference for rational analysis and simplistic quantitative metrics, despite the evidence that "we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness".
  • "The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. Many of these policies were based on the shallow social-science model of human behavior. Many of the policies were proposed by wonks who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can be measured and quantified. They were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy." (David Brooks, 2011)

dh_2

  • When the conversation is abstract, as it often is in strategic work or the realm of "good ideas", it is difficult to resolve. By building something we pull conversation towards consensus. We have to agree in order to build; the physical reality of something pulls discourse into a more meaningful, more tangible territory. So the motivation provided by the MacGuffin in question can be allied to realising strategies with rigour, in detail.
  • "He encouraged us to develop new ways of looking at design to reflect his unique ability to weave backwards and forwards between grand strategy and the minutiae of the tiniest of internal fittings. For him no detail was small in its significance and he would be simultaneously questioning the headlines of our project together while he delved into its fine print." (Norman Foster, 2011)
  • A prototype suggests a way of mitigating risk, through iterative approaches, while delivering ambitious change — it enables the platform and policy to develop structurally, finding a way to move free of the straitjacket of over-analysis and over-consultation.
  • "How do we ensure that public institutions designed for stability, predictability and compliance can also improve the capacity to anticipate, innovate and introduce proactive interventions in a timely way when the collective interest demands it?" (Jocelyne Bourgon, 2011)

dh_3

  • "If you really want to change the city, or want a real struggle, a real fight, then it would require re-engaging with things like public planning for example, or re-engaging with government, or re-engaging with a large-scale institutionalised developers. I think that's where the real struggles lie, that we re-engage with these structures and these institutions, this horribly complex 'dark matter'. That's where it becomes really interesting." (Wouter Vanstiphout, interview with Rory Hyde, 2010) This notion of dark matter suggests organisations, culture, and the structural relationships that bind them together as a form of material, almost. It gives a name to something otherwise amorphous, nebulous yet fundamental. Dark matter is a choice phrase. The concept is drawn from theoretical physics, wherein dark matter is believed to constitute approximately 83% of the matter in the universe, yet it is virtually undetectable. It neither emits nor scatters light, or other electromagnetic radiation. It is believed to be fundamentally important in the cosmos — we simply cannot be without it — and yet there is essentially no direct evidence of its existence, and little understanding of its nature.
  • The only way that dark matter can be perceived is by implication, through its effect on other things (essentially, its gravitational effects on more easily detectable matter).
  • Strategic design often involves doing what the physicist Fritz Zwicky started doing in 1934 — looking for the "missing mass", the material that must be inescapably there, that must be causing a particular outcome. This missing mass is the key to unlocking a better solution, a solution that sticks at the initial contact point, and then ripples out to produce systemic change
  • If it's too easy to get an idea accepted, you're probably doing it wrong. You're probably not disturbing the dark matter enough.
  • Westbury isn't a designer, but his ability to perceive the "architecture of the problem" in Newcastle is a perspective shared with strategic design. His focus is on the city as software, and this is drawn from some background in understanding the architecture of software and operating systems — this in turn means that systems thinking is an almost instinctive act. Given that Westbury and his cohorts understand the subtlety inherent in contemporary software, this turns out to be a productive view of both systems and cities, and the form of software that binds them together.
  • think strategically and systemically
  • Potter recalled how his cello teacher suggested how to "get the measure of a job, to get close to it, (you) project its life to absurdity (in all directions: scale, function, material, etc) and then pull back to some sense of boundary in what you propose to do". (Norman Potter, 1969)
  • "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." (Eliel Saarinen)
  • The design planner and teacher Hugh Dubberly has suggested that "seeing patterns, making connections, and understanding relationships" are in fact the essence of design.
  • It's almost instinctive, this sense of reaching into the very matter of an organisation and rearranging it on the fly. It is sometimes reactive, in response to a phone-call from the boss; it is sometimes anticipatory (his team mate Dani Alves has said that Xavi "plays in the future"). Either way, it requires an understanding of the architecture of two systems — the problem, and the organisation — and a sense of direction.
  • According to Slavin, the algorithms that drive, say, a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot are essentially not of humanity. "These are things that humans write, but can no longer read." (Kevin Slavin, 2011)
  • Instead, this is an idea of design as directly involved in the creation of culture (culture as a way of being, a pattern of living, after Raymond Williams, rather than simply cultural production and consumption).
  • It also means that by making small moves within a system, we may be able to shift the pattern at the macro-level, just as a single bird within a flock does. This is Kwinter's description of "a delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine". The "much larger machine" may not be malleable directly, or even capable of being understood. Yet it can still be affected.

dh_4

  • Strategic design is predicated on exactly this positioning: inside not outside, long-term not short, the pig not the lipstick.
  • Seeing like a system, and acting upon a system, means that traceability — clarifying one's impact upon the system in detail — is complex, if not virtually impossible, given the systems in question
  • Understanding the architecture of the problem, and then ensuring the ongoing delivery of the solution, cannot be done with the necessary rigour and agency unless from within the organisation

dh_5

  • The ecologist CS Holling wrote that "placing a system in a straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve". Conversely, one of the more influential systems thinkers and educators, Donella H Meadows, described resilience as "a measure of a system's ability to survive and persist within a variable environment".

dh_6

  • As opposed to engineering, with its focus on problem solving, strategic design is oriented towards questioning the question, reframing if necessary.
  • As opposed to policy-making expertise, with its focus on the creation of models, strategic design is predisposed to sketching and iterative prototyping as a learning mechanism, while engaging in stewardship to ensure that user-centredness and design intent is realised in delivery
  • As opposed to particular content expertise, focused within a bounded discipline, strategic design's discipline is in integrative systems thinking rather than a form of path dependency, and is able to move freely across disciplines rather than within them, revelling in the complexity of a more holistic understanding of the system.
  • As opposed to traditional design practice, strategic design attempts to move beyond products, services and spaces into relationships, contexts, and strategies, yet without losing sight of the symbiotic relationship between meta and matter, and genuinely engaging with the public and civic as much as with the commercial.
  • Strategy is enacted through a focus on the quality of execution, rather than an abstract model.
  • Strategic design tries to ally pragmatism with imagination, deliver research through prototyping, enable learning from execution, pursue communication through tangible projects, and balance strategic intent and political capital with iterative action, systems thinking and user-centredness.