Designing Good Systems After 2020
What to make of a year of crisis.
2020 hit different. We came to witness many of the so often repeated and neglected mantras of the past years come to bite us: from corroding social and political fabrics, to pervasive racism and ubiquitous inequalities, to underfunded public services and non-existent public digital infrastructure. It’s been a year of shock and learning — even though it remains a bit unclear what exactly we’ve been so shocked about (it’s not like any of the underlying problems had been really new to anyone) and what we really learned from it.
Calls for fixing the internet in 2020 felt a bit like Live8 rallies of the early 2000s: Everyone agrees, but everyone is part of the problem.
Like any good crisis 2020 invites us to rejoice in recalling better days. That works particularly well for the still young history of the IoT. Alas, the early days of excitedly building „things!“ and connecting them to the internet seem long gone. So do grand visions of magically intelligent homes and cities — and the niche critique from ethicists, designers, or speculative artists that accompanied them. Today, we’re wading through hundreds of pop-ups, asking us for our consent to be tracked, just before watching Shoshana Zuboff, conveniently nudged to us on Netflix, lay out the catastrophic consequences of that very tracking — and everything just feels a little on the nose. One is reminded of the devastating question that Mark Fisher asked us ten years ago: “What if you held a protest and everyone came?” [i]. And indeed, calls for fixing the internet in 2020 felt a bit like Live8 rallies of the early 2000s: Everyone agrees, but everyone is part of the problem.
Sobering up
What happened? How did we get from a “plentitude” [ii] of ideas and manifestos [iii] to a place where we all seem to have a very good understanding of the problem — but so very few viable alternatives to replicating it? In a sense, 2020 was a year of crisis in its very essence: It was full of decisions that were all equally pressing and impossible to make [iv]. Systems thinking has long argued that such a crisis can be productive and a motor for change. It can also be fatal. The “art of intervention” then is to seize a crisis’ productive capacity without overthrowing the system itself, by understanding all its “self-preserving pathologies”– and by timely displaying viable alternatives to current and dysfunctional models of reality [v]. Put differently: If we start thinking about crises as triggers for transitions, rather than (just) triggers for situational change, the creation of feasible alternatives to the status quo becomes a path-finding exercise, of simultaneously building new systems and escaping old ones. [vi]
Moving on requires honesty, and the willingness to not only change the other but also ourselves. So, where to start?
Okay, great. How to do that? Especially when we’re part of that very system ourselves? Maybe, if we see this year as an opportunity to pause, reflect, and learn, we might have a chance to come to terms with where we are (and where we are not) in order to move on collectively. That requires honesty, and the willingness to not only change the other but also ourselves. So, where to start?
Mind the gap(s)
Understanding a problem and solving it are two very different things (or are they?). And funnily enough, when it comes to digital technology it’s the very understanding of the problem that makes the solution so tricky: We now understand that designing good things really means designing good systems. And that designing a system is always a complex problem. Today, it involves planetary technological solutions as well as regulatory and political ones, it poses questions around ethics and democracy as well as very material concerns of supply chains and labor rights, it demands for accounting for environmental costs and resources as well as understanding human psychology, media cycles, and algorithmic fallacies. In other words, designing good systems is an inherently paradoxical task: it implies a need to focus on some things and leaving out others, while knowing that nothing can really be ignored for long — because, as 2020 has shown, it might just come back to bite us. We indeed have never been modern [vii], and neither has the IoT.
Designing good systems is an inherently paradoxical task: it implies a need to focus on some things and leaving out others, while knowing that nothing can really be ignored for long.
When facing the vast complexity of the task at hand it is tempting to end up in the dead end of the „nonsense“ [viii] of interchangeable ideas about good and bad, true and false, or relevant and irrelevant. A more fruitful alternative, however, is to realize that this paradox can be incredibly constructive and nuanced, once we mind the „gap” [ix] of interpretation that often sits in-between the world and our idea of it. With the introduction of the “invisible machines” this gap becomes the ubiquitous window to a constant “surplus” of possible but currently not realized realities, that can only be suspected but never fully known (there are only two other areas where this mandate for interpretation exists: religion and art).
If we do so, we might learn to proceed with greater caution when being confronted with easy answers to tricky questions in the future — even when we come up with them ourselves. Rather than proposing Dos and Dont’s that imply simplicity and promise quick successes, a more promising role for designers and researchers might lay in highlighting the gaps, that is all the things we’ve left out so far, willingly or unwillingly. We can’t solve everything at once, but we can at least be deliberate and vocal about what we are leaving out, and why we think that’s okay, for now. Three of such gaps come to mind in particular:
Place_Planet
Maybe the most obvious one is the distinction of global interdependencies and local solutions, and a place where this becomes particularly prevalent. The public places of a digitally connected world are full of gaps and hybrids, making it impossible to discern what part is technological, what is social, what is planetary and what is localized. To get from A to B in a city today is just as much shaped by the local Department of Transportation as it is by the latest developments of a global pandemic, and the most recent update of GoogleMaps. If we want to build robust solutions for these places we need to be more deliberate about how and where to draw these lines, and simultaneously plan for crossing them from the start.
Last year’s developments around Alphabet’s SidewalkLabs in Toronto are a case in point, where the global discourse, review, and reporting around how (not) to integrate corporate interests with regulatory frameworks, social policies and urban data, was just as fruitful and vivid as the local networks, activists and decisions on the ground. Sidewalk Toronto was just as much a matter of the Quayside as it was an exercise in planetary co-creation of meaning, opinions, and policies around the cities we want to live in.
Design_Discover
Whenever we set out to design good systems, we are bound to be part of them — for better or worse.
A second notion worth to recall is that whenever we set out to design good systems, we are bound to be part of them — for better or worse. Design is inherently subjective, it is just as much discovery as it is imagination, and bound to conjure, obscure, and interlink new realities for all techno-bio-social systems involved. For social systems that means creating (here literally in the sense of inventing!) stories about users and needs, problems and solutions, about public good and harm, privacy, safety, or resilience. But who even comes up with these terms? And what questions are we not asking? It helps to realize there just is no such thing as a neutral or objective discourse, let alone data, but really only mediated and co-constructed stories. So, whose are we telling? And how do we know what story we’re missing? If “truth is the invention of a liar”, as Heinz von Foerster proposes [x], then it certainly helps to be skeptical not only of our critics, but also of ourselves. Creating places to honestly listen and learn together, preferably with folks from the other side of the aisle, might be a way to do get ourselves out of our bubbles of truth and do justice to the gap between design and discovery. Here’s a fun example: There is an extraordinary subreddit called r/changemyview that, against, all odds manages to do exactly that: self-maintained, respectful, and honest conversations with the premise of learning and changing together. What if our things were designed to foster that?
If “truth is the invention of a liar”, as Heinz von Foerster proposes, then it certainly helps to be skeptical not only of our critics, but also of ourselves.
Hindsight_Foresight
Thirdly, there is the assumption that there even is a way to deliberately create any better system in the first place. Design inherently implies the dichotomy of a problem and a solution, an actual and a nominal, a present and a future — and with this another gap [xi]. On one side of that gap there’s hindsight, a grounded and often shared understanding of the past, the histories, data, struggles, and actions of everyone (and everything) involved. On the other side, there is foresight: the hopes, dreams, possibilities and expectations we have about the changes we want to see in the future. Both sides, hindsight and foresight, are made up continuously in the moment, and with that both sides are subject to change and reflection. To learn from 2020 can also mean to realize what parts of the past we actually do not want to give up, and what doubts of the future remain today.
For one, this means to look for the “hidden benefits” of the problems we encounter [xii]. If they are so persistent, chances are, they do serve a purpose beyond just being pesky obstacles in the way of change. Further, this implies asking ourselves, what doubts and questions are related to our aspired hopes. This requires honesty, and sometimes paradoxical questions: How do we all benefit from not finding a solution for ubiquitous online tracking? What is the value in choosing tech solutionism over the boring and tedious work of changing regulatory and social frameworks in the long run? What did we learn or gain by not having built and scaled up feasible alternatives to the status quo, yet?
If our problems are so persistent, chances are, they do serve a purpose beyond just being pesky obstacles in the way of change.
If we want to move from crisis to transition, it helps to be aware of these hidden benefits in order to account for them when designing “better” alternatives in the future. Not only does this make our new ideas more sustainable and resilient themselves. It also helps with moving from false dichotomies and simplified answers to a more grounded, albeit complex, idea of what kind of better systems we want to build.
Beyond Grand Plans
What to take from this? Bridging gaps without neglecting them! Sobering up after a crisis can mean to be honest and transparent about the inconsistencies and trade-offs we can’t escape, and to move beyond grand master plans and absolute narratives toward deeper, situated and explorative probes in order to surprise ourselves. The internet and the world it creates is genuinely “unmanageable” [xiii], but that does not mean we cannot change or design it. Learning from a year of crisis, however, might mean that designing good systems indeed requires a new attitude: One that opens up the gaps and paradoxes of our connected world, and aims to “expand complexity, rather than reduce it” [xiv]. Then, after all, the final and most promising take-away from this year could have been envisaged, again, by Fisher:
“From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
References
[i] Fisher, Capitalist Realism.
[ii] Gold, The Plenitude.
[iii] cf. Fritsch, Shklovski, and Douglas-Jones, “Calling for a Revolution.”.
[iv] Koselleck, Kritik Und Krise.
[v] Willke, “Strategien Der Intervention in Autonome Systeme.”
[vi] Buchel et al., “The Transition to Good Fashion”; Young and Lockhart, “A Cycle of Change: The Transition Curve.”
[vii] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
[viii] Flusser, Gesten: Versuch Einer Phänomenologie, 30.
[ix] Baecker, 4.0 Oder Die Lücke Die Der Rechner Lässt; cf. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft Der Gesellschaft.
[x] von Foerster and Pörksen, Wahrheit ist die Erfindung eines Lügners.
[xi] von Foerster, “What Is Memory That It May Have Hindsight and Foresight as Well?”
[xii] cf. Varga von Kibéd and Sparrer, Ganz im Gegenteil.
[xiii] Glanville, “The Value of Being Unmanageable: Variety and Creativity in Cyberspace.”
[xiv] with von Foerster, “Abbau Und Aufbau,” 51.
This text was first published as part of the 2020 ThingsCon Report on The State of Responsible IoT (RIOT), an annual collection of essays by experts from the ThingsCon community of IoT researchers and practitioners. It explores the challenges, opportunities and questions surrounding the creation of a responsible Internet of Things (IoT). You can find the full report and learn more about ThingsCon right here.
