Core Design Principles

Version 0.5

Considerations

Considerations are important elements of a context that designers should attend to when working on a challenge.

No Normal / No Crisis

There’s an urge to interpret the world as being normal and stable, occasionally experiencing a crisis and then going back to normal. That mindset needs to go away. First, there has never been a steady state. Second, for far too many, the “normal” of the past was unbearably harmful.

There is not an equilibrium to return to and there is no coming end to the turbulence. Some of that change will be dramatically for the better and some painful and unwelcome. If you keep trying to go back to normal, you prolong the harms.

We must shed these outdated ways of evaluating the challenges we face. We must embrace and design for continual change.

Beware Sustainability: The idea of “sustainability” is one casualty of this consideration. Sustainability implies a stability. It implies a set of practices that can go on forever. Some things being sustained currently should no longer be sustained. What practices and logics are you sustaining? Should you be sustaining them?

No Externalities

We need to end the practice of designing things that are beneficial at the small scale but create harm at the large scale. Every decision will need to incorporate a global understanding of its consequences.

The economists’ idea of externalities is meant to describe benefits or harms that can’t be fully captured in the cost of something. In contemporary practice, “externalities” has come to mean “harms that aren’t our problem.” Effects we can’t account for were mixed in with effects we don’t account for, allowing all kinds of new harms to sneak in. This needs to end. Decision-makers must become widely accountable for the consequences of our decisions. Since much of modern western civilization is based on limiting liability, this is a dramatic change in the way approaches are to be evaluated.

Always design to reduce harm. First order harms are your direct responsibility, second and third order harms should be anticipated.

Stewarding Loss

We need a practice of design that can help steward loss, manage trauma and hospice the ways of doing things in the world that need to die. The near future is going to involve a lot of disaster and difficulty, so we need approaches that incorporate those realities into how we do things.

Things end. Designers and institutions rarely account for this. If the end is not designed, then things tend to end badly. Empires tend to fall in flame. Collapse is rarely confined to the collapsing. In a period of continual change marked by increased vulnerability, we can expect a lot of loss. We must allow for loss. We must prepare for loss, we must find grace in loss, we must attend to the repair and healing of that which remains. In some cases, we must accelerate loss.

Speed = Justice

Where things are getting worse, delay is not a neutral act. The harms we seek to avoid and the challenges we seek to address are neither hypothetical nor in the future. They are present now. Justice demands they be addressed now.

Beware Speed: At the same time, one of the legacies we face is a a debris field of communities, cultures, and ecosystems that were overrun in the name of progress. Do not mistake any fast response for a good response.

Embrace Uncertainty

From an era that sought total control, we must act with the humility of knowing how little we can know about the consequences of our actions or the future context of our designs. This is a profoundly uncomfortable condition. We must find comfort in it.

Design Principles

Principles are ideals that shape a designer’s decision-making when proposing interventions.

Be Honest About Capacity

Designers and the things they design should provide honest assessments of their capabilities and limitations. Understanding actual capacity is essential for aligning narratives with reality. Do not make well-meant but empty promises. Be clear about what you can bring to bear and what your design is trying to do. In an uncertain world, allow others to understand you as much as possible, to enable them to make better decisions about whether and when to rely on you.

Work Beyond Hope or Fear

Action motivated by hope or fear is fragile. These are fickle and fleeting conditions. If a hopeful future will motivate action, a lack of hope justifies inaction. Find a more durable basis for your responsibility. It must endure overwhelming conditions. What is the duty of a designer? What is ethical design even in the face of certain failure?

Deploy Multiple Models

Always design a thing with the understanding that you, your ideas, and your interventions exist in a large world, but that you only have tools to understand and measure a small world. It is in the tremor between large and small worlds that you will find a pathway forward.

Recognize that all models fail, and that models cannot model themselves. Use multiple forms of knowledge to understand important things. Seek unbound agents. Dance between models.

Constrain the Strong

Find ways of binding ourselves to be better inhabitants of the planet. Avoid concentrating power and authority in a single actor or governing body. Implement mechanisms to constrain the strong and promote a more balanced distribution of power. Pay special attention to the risks and harms that could be caused by powerful actors. Pay special attention to luxury-driven externalities.

Work at the Speed of Trust

In the past, legitimacy has been the guiding aspiration with the assumption is that trust flows from legitimacy. We think that legitimacy flows from trust. The transcendental values that would ground legitimacy have lost their claim to universality and are bitterly disputed. Trust must be negotiated directly as an ongoing process rather than as an assumed consequence of externally granted legitimacy. Build trust. Be worthy of trust.

Create Shared Facts: This is accompanied by a positive obligation to build a platform of shared reality with everyone. This partially means a communications strategy but the broadcast model of “communications” is not adequate. Creating shared facts means gathering as well as distributing.

Commandments for the Polycene…

What are principles and considerations? In a typical strategic design project, you seek to articulate a vision, some design principles, and a set of interventions. Together, these become a plan of action.

• A vision is your slogan or high level ambition.
• Principles are a set of commands derived from insights about “is” and “should.”
• Interventions are a set of things you will do that aim towards achieving the vision, guided by the principles.

An Ever-Partial List

Making a list of principles is more art than science. To keep to a manageable length, a list of principles is necessarily incomplete. It leaves off much that goes without saying because it is obviously true, or ignorably false.

A list of principles operates at the border between accepted practice and unintegrated novelty. The purpose of the list is to draw attention to residents of those conceptual border towns and mark them as IN or OUT. The list puts readers on notice that these items in particular will be the subject of our care and attention.

Principles are typically written in an imperative form.

As we were attempting to assemble our set of principles for the design standard, a large number of our draft principles were variations on “take into account this aspect of reality.” We have begun thinking of those as considerations — limits, boundaries, or constraints that must be taken into account.

Like principles, they are worth listing because we think they live on the border between accepted and ignored. We believe that designers must take them into account, if they hadn’t already. Many of them have emphatically not been accounted for in the practices of architecture and design that have seen the most success through the 20th Century

In some ways this is just more finely sifting Design Principles. Making a clear distinction between these may ultimately be an aesthetic decision and we should not get too hung up on it. Far more important to settle on the list.

A List with Empty Spaces

These lists are necessarily incomplete in another way. There cannot be a universal list of design principles or considerations. Any such list must be profoundly context based. You must make your own depending on the conditions you face and where the borders of acceptable/unimaginable lie for your situation.