Dear Clive and all,
You raised a few interesting questions from which I have picked up two in response. 
First, you made a distinction between politics and design. But are not many matters of politics about (public) arguments and contestations made up of design oriented decisions? Like you, I am uncomfortable about treating every intentional human act as an act of design, for which design would then lose its meaning. But to build or not to build a nuclear station is first and foremost a design decision made by a city or a society--too often politicized and therefore cloaked as a political matter. This then makes the question of 'what does design mean in connection to the design of nuclear plants' a profoundly fundamental one--above and beyond the kind of cognitive hardships and impossibilities (and inevitabilities) involved in the designing of controls in power plants that Chuck Perrow presented in his 1983 paper on human factors engineering. 
Second and in relation to the first, there are in fact design principles, akin to design ethics, that pertain to this fundamental question. All designers practice these principles at one time or another; at some degree in every situation. And these principles are namely the precautionary principle and the principle of self-limitation. The former principle applied in this case is 'better to be safe than sorry': if we know that there is even a remote chance of hazardous impacts on human life and other living species, then we mustn't operate on nuclear energy. The latter principle subsequently behooves us to know, and then impose limits on our design (actions). If we rarely do the former well, we hardly do the latter at all; after all, much of design is about breaking limits. But for many designs existing in the world right now, there are indeed limits imposed artificially by the designer--limits that once transgressed do bring about negative externalities. 
But to the extent that organizations, cities or societies have not heeded these two principles of design, but have rather applied their own (usually skewed) version of cost-benefits analyses compounded by their own proprietary risk theories (e.g., the famous Pinto case...) even on nuclear energy, the nuclear crisis is indeed a crisis of design action rather than a crisis of politics. And because all these are principles of design action (i.e., precaution, self-limitation, and cost-benefit utilitarianism) applied to attain a teleological end, this is indeed a design problem. 
Insofar as this unfolding crisis is concerned, the irony is that designers who are equipped to consider the designerly dimension of the situation are usually not concerned with the gravity--after all this is not the main concern of 'design'. And engineers, scientists and technologists (and politicians) who are equipped to consider the gravity of the situation do not see this as a problem of design. And so the problem as you acutely defined falls into a no-man's land--much like Fukushima now--only to be discussed by a handful of designers cognizant of the problem on this forum. 
Until this is issue is acknowledged and the gap bridged, responsibilities can only fall on those who are directly responsible, even when 'design' demonstrates that this is a collective responsibility following the design action to build in order to harness nuclear energy. 
Jeffrey Chan



> Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:23:43 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Status of "design" re Japanese nuclear crisis? Reply to Norman
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> In regards to the unfolding double tragedies in Japan, Donald Norman’s
> “leap-to” diatribe in defense of engineers completely misses the
> point. In fact, it is part of the problem (in that, as the subsequent
> replies showed, it diverts the real question in all the wrong
> directions—no Virginia, building a 100-metre sea wall is not the
> answer).
> 
> My original post asked two questions. The first was open—what does the
> word “design” mean when it is used in connection with the design of  (or
> what I would call the configuration) of the Japanese nuclear plants?
> What is “design” here? What is that in the nuclear plant or as a quality
> of the plant, that causes commentators to talk of its ‘design”? 
> 
> The second question, which asked "to what extent does the failure of the
> Fukushima plant throw up the generic failure of purely technological
> models of design with respect to the construction, operation and
> implication(s) of complex systems?" was both a provocation and a deeply
> serious question. This was not aimed at individual engineers, for whom I
> have enormous sympathy, but at certain view of “how to design.” So the
> intent of the second question was not to skewer some poor bastard for
> not anticipating a 10-metre Tsunami (though let us say this is a nuclear
> plant in a zone prone to earthquakes, one that has experienced no less
> than 308 separate quakes within 200 miles in the last 11 days alone).
> Above all, it was not to suggest that the ‘design profession could have
> done it better.’ They would not. 
> 
> But we are, in all likelihood, facing a nuclear crisis. To be sure, in
> comparison to the much larger humanitarian disaster of the
> earthquake/Tsunami (which is also, we will see, a “design”
> problem—though not a design professional problem) this is (as yet)
> the smaller crisis. Indeed, its arguable that the nuclear crisis is
> diversion from the real problem, which is revealed to be the fact that
> an advanced and nominally extremely organized State cannot cope with
> even a relatively small humanitarian crisis; that it cannot organize
> basic supplies of food, water and shelter for less than 1% of its
> population (Today’s figures suggest just less than ½ million persons in
> need of food and shelter; 1.4 million without power). The real crisis
> then is the political one. 
> 
> But in relation to Fukushima we also have a technical crisis—a failure
> of technical back-up systems and of management and organization that has
> put on the table the prospect of a nuclear meltdown. 
> 
> It is irrelevant that, even in worse case scenarios, “only” the local
> population may be affected. Such scientific common-sense is useful to
> put the situation in context; it allays the apocalyptic—at least for the
> moment. But it also misses the point: the “meaning” of Fukushima is not
> in the number of eventual casualties but in the sense that here is a
> crisis that should not be occurring; and it should not be occurring (the
> public in this case intelligently perceives) because if you are dealing
> with technologies which have potential for disaster on the scale of the
> nuclear then you had damn well better make sure that you think through
> the consequences and implications of deploying this technology. 
> 
> In the case of Fukushima, disaster is the making not because of an
> “unexpected event” (earthquakes and thus Tsunami in this part of
> Japan are no more “unexpected” than icebergs were in the North Atlantic
> in April 1912) but because of a lack of resilience in the total system
> of which Fukushima is only one small part. 
> 
> The objective engineering response to this situation is not to lament
> the impossibility of the individual engineer thinking through every
> possibility—nor to advocate bigger walls. It is to ask a question about
> the system that, in effect, short-changed (doubtless on economic
> grounds) the conceptual procedure of thinking through the resilience of
> the system. (And which on another level short-changed also the capacity
> of local management to respond well to theshort-changing that lead them to concoct ad-hoc solutions (hoses of
> seawater as coolant) rather than, from the first moment, focusing also
> on re-connecting power, the loss of which is the real or at least the
> immediate “culprit” in this scenario. It is this failure that has seen
> today pathetic (and failing attempts) to drop water by helicopter over
> the plant, 90% of which cannot possibly reach its intended target, and
> which (as I write) is about to see attempts by water cannon to spray
> water on the reactors! Such ad-hoc responses are perhaps courageous, in
> a Heath-Robinson kind of way, but they are also evidence of severe
> systemic failure.   
> 
> So the issue is not the “poor bloody infantry” of the front-line
> engineers, doubtless also busy obeying company dictat as to cost and
> economy, the question is how do we think adequately—which means think
> socially, politically, economically as well as technologically, about
> the complex trade-offs involved in the “design” of such systems? This
> comes back to my original questions, first, about the “design” of the
> plant (what does it mean exactly to “design” a nuclear plant?) and
> second about whether the complex levels of failure at Fukushima throw
> light on the ‘generic failure of purely technological models of design
> with respect to the construction, operation and implication(s) of
> complex systems?’ Notice the qualifier here. This is not the nonsense
> question of the design professions “doing better” than the engineers, it
> is a question about the adequacy of the ways in which conceptually and
> operationally we think of the conception, operation (and ownership) of
> complex technological systems which contain within them the
> possibilities for disaster. 
> 
> One issues here is political. Should private companies be allowed to run
> such plants—when as we’ve seen spectacularly this year with the BP
> case—the companies instinct is both to cut costs to the bone and to
> abandon as rapidly as possible the site of its disasters? The point here
> is that such questions today demand to be brought into the total “design”
> process. Yet part of what we are talking about here is that while we are
> certainly talking in some ways here about “design” (this word referring
> to a configurational choice amongst alternatives) “design” is itself a
> completely inadequate term (with all the wrong associations) for the
> kind of process which needs to be undertaken. So we come back again to
> the question: what does it mean to “design” such plants? And what does
> the answer to that question tell us about the responsibilities and work
> of “design” as a whole?  
> 
> Clive 
> 
> 
> Clive Dilnot
> Professor of Design Studies
> School of Art Design History and Theory
> Parsons School of Design,
> New School University.
> Room #731
> 2 E 16th St
> New York NY 10011
> e [log in to unmask]