January 21, 2021

Dancing

(Wrestling)

“Regulation is a sign of design failure.” William McDunough

“The Cobra Effect” a behavioral economics podcast in the Freakonomics series, humorously details several public policy case studies that illustrate the cobra effect, the name for a type of perverse incentive where unintended negative consequences arise in response to designed interventions. In this particular case study, the British colonial government in India, in attempting to reduce a rattlesnake overpopulation, began to offer a bounty for every dead snake retired and exchanged for bounty. Human adaptive capacity being what it is, the bounty program resulted in the precise opposite of its designed intention when enterprising individuals began breeding rattlesnakes in order to collect the bounty. When the program was suspended, the then-worthless rattlesnakes were released into the wild, thus exacerbating the existing rattlesnake problem.

Perverse incentives are unintended and unanticipated results, typically of launches, public programs or initiatives, that are unwanted or undesirable. A commonplace feature of our hyper designed world, unintended consequences whether they be positive, negative or merely humorous, are a glimpse into the workings of complex emergent systems. They reveal the multivalent creative energy of stakeholders within any system. Human and non-human actors lend instrumental force to designed artifacts, affording a spectrum of contingent possibilities from palliatives to threats. Gaming the system is after all a highly creative response to constraints. Contingency is a feature of complexity. Contingency is challenging to the modern mind. It speaks of being subject to the unforeseen, being provisional, of being ambiguous, unresolved or unresolvable.

Think back to a time when you were involved in a high-energy brainstorming charrette that was brought to a dead stop by this phrase: “But that’ll never work because…” For designers, it’s easy to be stymied by contingencies within the design problem space. Contingency consciously or unconsciously puts us in touch with our frailty. Faced with the possibility of knock-on effects of a given design initiative, many designers choose not to act for fear that they will make the situation worse. Sometimes this is truly the case and indeed the precautionary principle always applies. Yet contingency offers an opportunity for greater discernment about where we have the responsibility to encourage a system to move toward health, versus where designed intervention is irresponsible. Suspend judgement as you design, not getting caught up spinning possible contingencies. Suspending judgment to dance in the space of contingency is an essential capacity for conscious designers. High functioning means holding this problem space of contingency instead of being shut down or disempowered by contingent factors. Core dispositions such as courage to engage (to dance), letting go of the impulse to control, and refusal to check out in overwhelm, are key.

Every designed act carries on designing indefinitely. Contingency is a fundamental characteristic of design. It can always become otherwise. Each and every innovation creates unforeseeable consequences, without exception. The process mechanics of evolution remain a Mystery. One way that human beings have over time explained it to themselves is by recourse to a dialectical structure that is chaordic, exhibiting elements of chaos and order simultaneously (Hock). As emergent systems these designed events co-arise in the messy primordial tension of open innovation. This much is certain - there will be knock-on effects. Some will be delightful while others will be unwanted. When we recognize rigid, fear-based narratives that seek order and control, we can be sure that we have gone down the monological old-school path. It’s important to stay in the moment regardless of how raw it feels.

By appreciating the ontological nature of the world we create and inhabit, we arrive at better questions about the probable consequences and incentives that any given design may invite. We not only acknowledge the reality of consequences but we learns to dance with consequences as vital and primary considerations of any designing effort. Making contingencies central to our designing acknowledges that we are always co-designing - not what the design is, but rather what the design does. We can develop the habit of anticipating, cross-referencing similar case studies, and dancing with what a design affords its intended and unintended participants.

Judgement and reactivity are obstacles to conscious design work. For example, decision matrices are only as good as the assumptions they begin with. Our data analytics are conditioned by the depth and quality of our inquiry. The capacity to suspend judgement, otherwise known as not knowing, involves cultivating the ability to hold the creative tension that happens when the ideation process is not yet landed on a solution. Capacity to not land - to suspend judgment, and to defer critical reason while actively sensing into the moment - allows us to access the next possibility. Curiosity allows one to be in participation with what MIT professor and ULab Founder Otto Scharmer calls “the emerging future”. Scharmer’s Presencing method teaches the practice of “letting go and letting come” as we voluntarily and collectively surrender into the indeterminacy of the present moment signified by the bottom of the “U” shaped process. <Yielding -Intervening>

As broken structures are replaced by emergent, provisional structures, it gets messy. This messy space of contingency is virtually guaranteed. Because the social, ideological, economic, technological and cultural domains of existence are inextricably inter-becoming, there is no such thing as a cultural space free of other dimensions of reality. Significant postmodern innovations such as collaboration and sharing will inevitably spur perverse incentives and gaming of systems. Existing protections, regulatory mechanisms, and agreements may well be disrupted in the process of making way for more justice and beauty for all. Many people will profit during times of crisis and transition. Although too few individuals do control too great a percentage of our planetary resources, this too will change as brittle and unbalanced distributions experience inevitable corrections.

While dancing-wrestling in the existential dissonance of contingency, conscious designers can do their part by not mapping the past onto the future in the form of expectations, habits and judgements. Labeling that messy interim “greed” or “co-optation” is counterproductive of the social good. Analyzing emergent patterns in order to understand root causes is important, if difficult work —not for the purpose of finding fault or assigning blame— but rather to develop the intermediate design interventions capable of alleviating the suffering and disruption that accompanies the messiness of change. <Toggling - Assuming>

Appreciating is tricky due to the emphasis in critiquing in design education. We need critique - in balance with appreciation. In critically - appreciatively assessing possible designs, we can suspend judgment while tolerating the physical and cognitive dissonance that this elicits, allowing us to stay with the iterative process long enough to explore both perverse and virtuous possibilities. Being for rather than against is a rich lifelong practice in a society where we are bombarded with confrontation, competition and negativity. Like a sailboat tacking toward a distant landmark, designing while consciously aware of contingency is a constant process of course correction. Dancing in the space of contingency, the designer avoids getting hooked into the judgments and blame that close off possibilities. When we dare to innovate we will by necessity be off course, with incremental modifications and their intended and unintended effects often looking and feeling like failures along the way. What might typically be dismissed as a failed design may, through a kind of forensic reverse engineering from perverse incentives back to intentions, be revealed as a viable beta-test for an entirely different kind of design application. Design forensics is a way to disclose the sparks of genius that often emerge from so-called “failures.” Shall we dance?

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