Designing Towards Openness
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, August 19 2010
Over on Frog Design's design mind blog, the lovely Tim Leberecht lays out his thoughts on how you "design for the loss of control." In other words, how do you go about thinking about building out user interfaces and artwork and websites and organizational management systems if your hope, really, is to open things up to new people and new ideas? Rich as Tim's piece is, it's tough to summarize. But here's a taste:
Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.
For the folks who tasked with the actual building of .gov websites or online advocacy hubs, there are some obvious implications for their work processes here.
But there's a bigger theme about opening up systems running through what Tim is saying, I think, that is useful for anyone pushing organizations and institutions to be more porous and engageabale. Filibuster reform has become something of the latest cause at least on the progressive side of things, but you can make the case that the Senate filibuster is really a proxy for a mess of system quirks and operating procedures that seem, to some, to make things run badly. You can place too much importance on design and system engineering, for sure, and start to see it as far more determinative than it really is. After all, people have minds of their own. But the idea that design -- of systems, of experiences -- has considerable political implications seems like an underexplored one. Anyway, give Tim's post a read.