Six

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 [...]