Terry,
Thanks. My gut feeling is that real consideration of #4 and #7 is likely to lose out to the interests of status quo and entrenched power. I hope I'm wrong.
Gunnar
On Dec 5, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> Hi Gunnar,
>
> Thanks for your message. Things have been drifting a bit off course. When I
> asked the questions my main interest in the issue is as a complex
> socio-technical systems designer and researcher. I asked the questions I did
> to find out the state of play to get some insights into whether the process
> was worth looking at more deeply in terms of its design properties (as well
> as to get a better understanding of what to me appeared weird). Here's some
> other thoughts.
>
> The doctoral scholarships application and distribution system is probably
> best considered as a single positive feedback loop socio-technical system.
> There are some other minor loops but the main loop is that a school that
> gets success in doctoral scholarships gets additional financial, labour and
> status resources that are available to raise its research quality and hence
> increase its potential for gaining more doctoral scholarships and that then
> has the future effect of potential for increased research quality and that
> results in more doctoral scholarships... etc onward and upward until
> diseconomies of scale kick in or the school gets divided.
>
> In systems design terms, the kind of design characteristics of this
> socio-technical system I'm interested in are:
>
> 1. Sensitivity of the system to unexpected small variations, The system was
> designed assuming and dependent for its stability on certain kinds of
> tightly defined inputs. Gaming amendments provide unexpected variations of
> inputs. Preferably the system should be insensitive to them. In this case,
> the system is highly sensitive to unexpected variations and these can
> significantly shift system benefits to the agent making the unexpected small
> variations. In part the significant scale of this effect is due to the next
> issue.
>
> 2. Are the effects of variables orthogonal? Does a change in any one
> variable result in negligible change in other variables. In this system, the
> variables are very much not orthogonal. They are highly co-dependent. A
> single gaming intervention on one variable can have significant influence
> on multiple variables and thus increase the leverage of the gaming.
>
> 3. Does the system isolate unusual conditions or at least reduce the
> propagation of their effects through the system? In this system, the effects
> of a small gaming manoeuvre leverage on each other, multiply and propagate
> in an additionally leveraged fashion with the system acting as a zero sum
> process because it is simply competitive and has fixed resources. The
> situation may leverage itself again over multiple cycles to the benefit of
> the gamer because the system has a positive feedback loop and any advantage
> gained in any one cycle offers benefits for leveraging again in future
> cycles. In the limit, manoeuvres that provide benefit can result in that
> agent acquiring all of the system resources.
>
> 4. Are there ethical considerations? Yes.
>
> 5. Does this affect the stability of larger scale meso or macro-system
> ecologies. In this case, the doctoral scholarship assessment and
> distribution system is a core and strategic part of the whole of university
> research quality improvement system for future development of research
> profile in a highly competitive research-led education market. Potentially,
> malfunctioning of the doctoral scholarship system can significantly
> compromise key strategic university wide initiatives for competitive
> organisational development. In other words, it can adversely affect the
> overall future functioning of the university, including its ability to
> employ academic staff.
>
> 6. Is the scale of the problem significant? Can it be ignored? Will it be
> addressed by alternative means? It may be any problems may be addressed by
> ad-hoc informal methods such as the heads of all the other schools jumping
> up and down if it appears that the process is resulting in biased outcomes.
>
> 7. Are their design interventions that can address and resolve the emerging
> issues? The most obvious ones are a) additional care and attention to
> inputs, b) special focus on inputs that already have unusual features in
> their submissions (e.g., art, design, engineering, creative writing), c)
> improved system variable monitoring throughout, d) meta- systemic processes
> intended to increase control variety without increasing system variety.
>
> I'm not sure that these forms of design analysis are taught in many design
> schools yet. Interestingly, it appears that they are taught in a simplified
> form in secondary schools here in Western Australia in History. In the UK 2
> decades ago, the above kind of design analyses were common in community
> development studies (as well as in hard-system non-linear control system
> dynamics and Operations Research). Would be good if they were taught in
> design schools at undergrad level.
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
> research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gunnar
> Swanson
> Sent: Saturday, 4 December 2010 11:32 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: An academic question.
>
> Terry,
>
> If there is a system that assumes one particular activity and others have to
> shoehorn what they do into a foreign (to them) set of assumptions, nobody
> should be surprised if categories get stretched at best. Try to fill out a
> vehicle registration form designed for cars if your vehicle is a bicycle. I
> don't know enough about the GB and Oz systems to comment on proper
> distribution of funds. I will note, however, that it looks at first glance
> like you are naturalizing a status rather than arguing explicitly.
> There is a system for distributing money. You believe that certain
> activities should be rewarded above others. The people who believe otherwise
> have tried to incorporate other activities for reward. You seem to describe
> this as "gaming" the system.
>
> Your system is political. It was created by human beings for particular
> reasons (probably a mixture of good an bad ones.) It is, in some sense, a
> game. People who play a game are playing a game, not gaming it. If you are a
> basketball player who thinks dunking is the most important thing, it may
> make sense to call for the elimination of the three-point rule. It doesn't
> make sense to condemn those who shoot from beyond thirty feet for "gaming
> the system."
>
> Maybe your reply is that the problem is that you are trying to play
> basketball and they showed up for a hockey game. That may be valid but at
> some point we have to notice that someone built a bunch of basketball courts
> and no hockey rinks but they keep admitting hockey players and happily
> taking their money.
> I may just be too bleary on a Saturday morning and am misreading but there
> seems to be a strong subtext in what you write: not just that art and design
> practice is being rated wrong compared to research in this particular
> instance but that such practice is really not worthy of university support
> at all. Am I misreading?
>
> Gunnar
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