Good design, compassion and communities
25. Systemic inquiry shall accompany investment commitments in the technosphere; thereafter, end-to-end producer responsibility applies.
Throughout Preflight Checklist, and our previous series Proof of Concept we have placed great hope on Systems Thinking. What is that, again? Yes, trying to see systems in their totality – but also: humility with regards to knowledge.
In this case, rather than assuming you know enough (Facebook: “move fast and break things”) to chuck out products and see how they boom, bust or blow up; instead, armed with this humility, and with eyes and ears open to the variety of impacted perspectives, companies can move more deftly and discretely to create sustainable, durable designs.
Disruption, moving fast and breaking things, asking for forgiveness and not for permission, creating minimum viable products and trying them out on The Market – these things are fetishised in our intensely consumerist and wealth-focussed version of capitalism. And because importance is mainly attached to economies, economics and money, we are acculturated to the restrictive dimensions of this perspective. But such reductionism has landed us with outcomes we know well: the climate and biodiversity crisis, massive inequality, and more besides. It’s not enough to wring our hands and look to the market in hope that an answer will appear – it hasn’t so far.
So we’re back to the rails – constitutional change – and with this principle, a principle both of humility and an approach to reality, we have an important pre-flight check, as it were, for any durable, sustainable, economic activity.
Talking points:
- Technosphere, Investment Commitments, Systems Thinking
- Increased urbanisation as symbolic
- Coal as a case in point
- The internet creates monopolies
- Systems Thinking
- Design Principles, Dieter Rams
- Good intentions vs. Accountability
- Uber and The London Assembly: City pushes Back
- The casualisation of labour
- Airbnb and communities
Links:
On the Technosphere, Jan Zalaceiwicz says (Guardian, 2015):
These machines – cars, planes, computers and much else – have, together with their human software, been termed the technosphere by the geologist Peter Haff of Duke University. He views it as an emergent system with its own internal dynamics (and which humans currently drive but don’t really control) – in effect an offshoot of the biosphere. Whatever it is, it is evolving at lightning speed by comparison with biological evolution.
Haff, who is also a civil engineer, coined the term for his 2013 paper. You can – and definitely should – read the abstract here
On the casualisation of labour – “I could have been a somebody… instead of a bum, which is what I am.”Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront (1954 – IMDB trailer, 01:35):https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047296/
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