Day: 22 June 2018
Mithering about the unmodellable
It is not every post you will read which links the choice of web domain name to the results of the civil war, but it is characteristic of this one that that’s exactly what it does. If you are interested in the arcane minutiae of parliamentary structure, this post is for you. But behind the specific points, there is something much more generally significant which should interest everybody, including those who, inexplicably, are not fascinated by parliamentary minutiae.
Computers crystallise systems. That’s fine for as long as the crystallised form remains valuable – and sometimes that can be quite a long time. But it’s not at all fine for systems which need to retain flexibility and adapt to changing circumstances – and that’s quite a lot of systems.
The lack of a fixed, exhaustive ruleset means Parliament is open to exaptation and adaptation. It is evolutionary by design. It is not brittle. It can sway in winds. Computers on the other hand are really not like this. They tend to prefer defined rulesets. They are deterministic. They are dumb. They are brittle.
So the question becomes whether we can get brittle computers to support systems which are not brittle. And that’s a question which matters much more widely than just for parliament.
Designers as power brokers
If designers can redistribute power, the choices they make are political – the distribution of power, and the choices it enables, being fundamentally what politics is about.
That is, of course, true regardless of whether designers recognise or acknowledge that that is what they are doing. This post does make – and celebrate – that acknowledgment, without perhaps fully following through the implications. The claim is a strong one:
As a designer in government my role is to give power to those people who often feel disempowered.
Giving power to the powerless is not a self-evidently neutral ambition. Digital is inescapably political.
That’s not to say that that ambition is wrong or is one that designers should not pursue – or even that expressing it in those terms is necessarily politically controversial. But “to redress the balance between the powerful and the disempowered in our society” is inescapably political – and so leaves us with the question of whose choice that is or should be.