Intellectually Curious - Edition 18
Welcome to the 18th Edition of the Intellectually Curious Newsletter. I would like to thank all the subscribers and for those who haven’t subscribed, please do so that you don’t miss the editions. A big thanks to all those who shared their feedback through direct messages.
Book for the edition:
We are going to discuss about a book that critically examines the impact of our creations for the past several centuries, has been altering our surroundings thereby impacting the only planet that we know where life can exist. We don’t think and understand clearly the impact of everything we create and how we should be careful about the future creations that we may put on this world. What we are now is clearly impacted by both past and the present decisions that has been taken and being taken.
The book that we are talking about is Assembling Tomorrow by Scott Doorley & Carissa Carter from the Stanford d.school. Stanford d.school known for its innovative approach to design and teaching design for a better world.
This book is superbly designed clearly standing up to the reputation of Stanford d.school – with colored illustrations, spacious printing, explaining the concepts through fictional stories and making us think – clearly has the stamp of Stanford d.school in every aspects of its production.
Apart from this book, d.school has also published few others you can learn about them here - https://dschool.stanford.edu/ books and I have read few of them including the interesting book by Carissa Carter The secret language of Maps which tackles the important topic of the approach to interpret data that is shown in various graphical formats.
The concept behind the book:
This books expands on what many experts are warning us about: not thinking in systems when we are creating/actioning something, but just solving the problem/situation in a siloed manner. It takes a new approach of looking at the histories of what has happened and how it has impacted and then imagines a future of what might happen if we continue this path. The authors use an important term ‘runaway design’ to define a design that is not thinking about its impact to the larger society – basically a design that has run out of control. At the same time we need to remember – nature also is a runaway design but it is a design that has been designed to learn from feedback and adapt to what it encounters and be in control. If there is a nature's frenzy it is mostly due to human tinkering of nature that doesn't suit with its natural design.
Detailing out the concept:
The authors start the book about what causes the runaway design. They theorize there are four main intangibles that cause this – Connections, Flow with speed, Feelings and Make-believe.
Connections are always good. But only problem is we feel that everything is happening in isolation. The authors take a simple example of a pen and explain how the design impact is layered – right from manufacturing to distribution to no clear plan to discard a pen causing landfills with leaky ink & lead – not good for the surroundings and how the design of a pen is not suitable for someone who is left handed. I don’t think many of us would have thought this simple question – is the simple pen designed to be used in either of the hands ?
There is a company that sells pens and stationary for left handed people: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-Best-Pens-Stationery-for-Left-Handers/pt/891
And if you think it is only the design of the pens are not suited for the left handers, then you are wrong: https://www.businessinsider.in/16-little-ways-that-the-world-is-designed-for-right-handed-people/articleshow/55732704.cms
Now let us look at a set of connections that are created by nature – the system of Roots in a plantation. Roots of the trees in an environment help each other through a complex network of connections through the roots. Even when one of the trees is cut, the roots of that tree still continue to receive nutrients from other surrounding trees to keep it healthy as nature has adapted that if that tree is not taken care and catches a disease rest of the forest will also be damaged. This is a wise system. A system is wise when it is dynamic, diverse and distributes things well like the root systems.
Whereas static and self-serving ignorant systems just consume resources in one direction like a resource pool that is held by a powerful country and is not shared with others to grow at the expense of others.
An interesting hypothesis to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KWM7Shy4BQ
The next intangible is flow – flow with speed. When things are designed with speed and not thought through and tested well it causes humongous damage to the society and nature. There is one scientist who has the dubious distinction of inventing two things that caused immense environment damage – Leaded petrol (to eliminate engine knocking) & CFC for refrigeration – Thomas Midgley Jr - One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
In the current progress of technology it is the data that is flowing with more speed that we can control. The speed of transformation is so fast even nature and culture is struggling to keep us in check. The system cannot handle one layer going faster asynchronously and that causes friction and then the failure that we all do not want. You can see that with all the different cyber scams that are going around.
How algorithms can cause chaos – simple ones like a traffic app algorithm - https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-echo-park-traffic-20180404-story.html
And what happened once this was made to a one way street: https://www.businessinsider.com/flying-tesla-stands-out-long-history-of-stunts-on-baxter-2022-3?IR=T
Everything that was invented or innovated can be traced down to feelings. Daughter asking her father to see the picture he took in the camera resulted in the creation of Polaroid camera. Frustration of not ?getting a parking slot in 1922, made C L Peckham of LA to come up with the concept of drive in markets – strip malls with huge parking lot in front of it even now. So the simple loop can be thought as – Circumstances create feelings; feelings shape ideas and Ideas lead to new circumstances and the loop continues again. Same is now with the social media that drives emotions to capture our attention to their respective apps so the get more advertisement revenue.
The next intangible that influences our design is the limited sensory world that we all live in.? None of us in the world know everything about everything and everyone so anything that we create can have consequential impacts to someone whom we never intended to cause harm. Apart from the limited sensory perceptions we are guided by our own biases in our subconscious. In most of the earlier newsletter that we have covered this topic in detail. So we will take a very simple example of our brain not being able to think in probabilistic outcomes resulting in something called Gamblers Fallacy.
Another important concept that we all need to remember is called Apophenia which is the inclination to see a connection in data or pattern in randomness. Sometimes with some good thinking from our side we can convert an apophenia to an epiphany. So the narrow view of the world that appears to us in our narrow view of reality is called Doxa.
So how do we stop the runaway designs that we create from our intangible nature ?? It is by being awkward; by Shapeshifting; by disorienting and by aiming for imperfection.
Awkward situations are always opportunities as we are left in a new place/culture all by ourselves while we wait for our guides who will help us navigate the awkwardness. So we should use this opportunity to observe by resisting the urge to get out of the awkwardness. We need to cultivate noticing as a habit and it can give us many interesting lessons. And we need to learn that not all awkward situations need to be resolved with a solution.
Shapeshifting is the process of different ways of thinking and doing. So how can we do that ? By getting new social connections very diverse from us, thinking in metaphors helps us to ground ourselves or thinking how different sets of people will use something that you are designing. We need to learn a bit about other disciplines that influence our design and that broadens our understanding. Sometimes apply a different analogous inspiration into your situation and that helps you to shapeshift. Create maps of your understanding and identify areas that you have no idea about. This helps one to understand the limitations in our thinking.
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Practicing deliberate disorientation helps in making things that we take for granted to be removed and see how you can tackle it. Anything that you design hits a turbulence – turbulence of weather or emotions or systems causing unexpected issues. Though the aircraft's are designed to handle turbulence, what happens when sudden turbulence hits when food is being served – I don’t think this was a consideration.
Rethinking our success goals, removing things instead of adding, reorient your actions, remake things than what they are designed for – these methods will help us to practice deliberate disorientation and stop us from creating any new runaway designs.
The last method is to design with imperfection. This is a crucial difference that used to be there between eastern and western thinking and designing.? But western thoughts have taken over and we try to design everything for perfection resulting in breakdown of systems.
So prevent runaway systems, we should make sure that are not developing anything in isolation but thinking broadly keeping our emotions in check and ensuring that efficiency is not always the criteria for the design and keep in mind even after all the considerations our design can cause unintended consequences.
Learnings for our daily life:
This book actually forces us to think about and rethink about day to day actions, tools/technology usage and what we are contributing to the world by our own creations. Many of us think we are not designers and therefore we don’t create anything, that is a false assumption. Any action we take in the world creates something – it can be music, writings, data, app, algorithm and of course the waste that we generate from our creations.
We all create – our choices of how we build our homes, how we commute etc etc impacts everyone else and other way around. This book provides a framework that we can adapt to ensure that we are not creating or propagating runaway designs that will cause mayhem and we pause and apply this framework every time. When you challenge the doxa of your design, you will sure crate a better design.
It is important to look back to move forward: https://www.healthandenvironment.org/environmental-health/social-context/history/precautionary-principle-the-wingspread-statement
Should this book be part of your library and to be referred frequently : YES
New Technology Advance:
How to build lighter cars? With lighter steel of course ?
Something new to learn:
Did you know Kobayashi shake: A powerful way to solve problems confronting you is to reframe them innovatively: A real life example on how small framed Kobayashi was able to eat more hot dogs than other well built competitors:
Podcast episode of this Newsletter:
Hear from the Dunning of the famous Dunning-Kruger effect and more in this episode of Choiceology:
Something Interesting to know about:
What happened to planet X: You will learn the importance of digging through the data and understanding the context behind the data and not just believing the data as presented to you.
Few news reports from the archives:
Interesting isn’t it ?
Hope you enjoyed this edition!
Do share your feedback on the newsletter!
Another one to learn. Thank you Anand.