Six

SOCIAL PLANNING

Designing the Evolving Artifact

p 161

[Ambitious planners: Plato, Sir Thomas More, Marx; social revolutions in America, France, Russia...]

p 163

[...] the voyages to the Moon and the survival of the American Constitution [...] are triumphs of bounded rationality. [...] they were evaluated against limited objectives.

The success of planning on such a scale may call for modesty and restraint in setting the design objectives [...].

REPRESENTING THE DESIGN PROBLEM

Organization as Representation

p 165

[Marshall plan] With a little reflection it is easy to see that very different [...] plans would result from implementing [...] different approaches [...]. Conceptualizing the problem in a particular way implied organizing the agency in a manner consistent with that conceptualization.

p 166

What was needed was not so much a correct conceptualization as one that could be understood by all the participants and that would facilitate action rather than paralyze it.

Finding the Limiting Resource

p 167

A design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce factor is attention.

Representations Without Numbers

p 169

If optimizing was out of the question, the framework allowed the committee to arrive to a satisficing decision that was not outrageous or indefensible.

[...] Numbers are not the name of this game but rather representational structures that permit functional reasoning, however qualitative it may be.

DATA FOR PLANNING

Prediction

p 170

Since the consequences of design lie in the future, it would seem that forecasting is an unavoidable part of every design process.

Feedback

p 172

Two complementary mechanisms for dealing with changes in the external environment are often far more effective than prediction: homeostatic mechanisms [energy storage, excess in capacity...] that make the system relatively insensitive to the environment and retrospective feedback adjustment to the environment's variation.

WHO IS THE CLIENT?

Professional-Client Relations

Society as the Client

TIME AND SPACE HORIZONS FOR DESIGN

p 178

Each of us sits in a long dark hall within a circle of light cast by a small lamp.

Discounting the Future

p 179-180

By applying a heavy discount factor to events, attenuating them with their remoteness in time and space, we reduce our problems of choice to a size commensurate with our limited computing capabilities. We guarantee that, when we integrate outcomes over the future and the world, the integral will converge.

Our myopia is not adaptative, but symptomatic of the limits of our adaptability. It is one of the constraints on adaptation belonging to the inner environment.

The Change in Time Perspective

p 182

...eating an apple revealed to us the nature of good and evil...

Defining Progress

p 183

...we have learned to look farther than our arms can reach.

The Management of Attention

DESIGNING WITHOUT FINAL GOALS

p 186

...evaluate a design [without] well-defined criteria... [see discovery processes, in chapter 4]

[music, painting, wine] Exposure to new experiences is almost certain to change the criteria of choice...

p 187

Making complex designs that are implemented over a long period of time and continually modified in the course of implementation has much in common with painting in oil. [cyclical interaction]

The Starting Point

p 187

The idea of final goals is inconsistent with our limited ability to foretell or determine the future.

[Good initial conditions to our successors:] offering as many alternatives as possible to future decision makers, avoiding irreversible commitments [...].

Designing as Valued Activity

Social Planning and Evolution

THE CURRICULUM FOR SOCIAL DESIGN

p 190

1. Bounded rationality [...]
2. Data for planning [...]
3. Identifying the client [...]
4. Time and space horizons [...]
5. Designing without final goals [...]