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Dear all, I am not sure whether I misread or misunderstood most of the mails, but I haven't found yet any answer to Clive's point: >> 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. I wouldn't blame any engineer, operator etc. for what is happening as such. I tend to believe that all these people do their jobs reasonably well, within the limits of probabilities. If, in 30 years from now, the consequences of global warming render significant parts of our Earth inhabitable, will it be time to see who should be blamed ? This is the same question : any nuclear engineer (living in a country that has the arrogance to produce 75% of its energy through the safest nuclear power plants that exist...) will tell you that it is all, almost planned for. Tested. Calculated. Doubled. Tripled. 0,0001% probability... but who knows that, for the oldest power plants, some operators and engineers are retiring, and when they leave, no one really knows any more the story of the wiring, relays, control systems that are not manufacturd anymore (BTW, old is short, in that field : 25/30 years... no upgrade or fix... and then : a monument of concrete and radioactive waste that needs to be taken care of for thousands of years). All this takes care of the entity in isolation, not in connection to. Say: to a truck that crashes on the motorway and blocks the access, while you would need all fire brigades, to an engineer on holiday and his replacement ill. In my understanding, what Clive is asking is closer to an ontological question : who takes the responsibility for implementing, maintaining and endorsing the accident of major technological systems ? It is too easy to blame a few politicians. It is like blaming some stupid engineer who didn't crosscheck the results. The question is : why, and to what extent, does a community delegate. Why, and to what extent, the debate is broken down to experts-who-know against people- who-don't. Why is the fact of that a community says calmly and deliberatly "no" (to nuclear energy, to shale gas, to GM crops, to mining, to dams...) considered primitive and regressive. When imposing this is the local consequence, the upper crust, of an unsustainable society? Note that I am saying accident, not failure. What is, by essence, not predictable. The odd thing is that the destroying "potential" of some of our technological systems (major dams, power plants, but also the aggregated consumption of natural resources) is close (for the human community) to those of natural disasters. Uncertain (don't know when and where), affects the "innocents" (no victim has made the decisive wrong act), massive and long lasting (reshapes deeply the life of communities). I do think that Clive has an essential point. Maybe my phrasing and understanding is slightly different, but it seems to me important that the design community, as one of the communities that claims to interface? connect ? represent ? mediate ? between the human society and its material and specificaly technical "infrastructure" goes a bit beyond the "it could be designed better". However you turn it, a disaster is an event, not a design failure. One of the things I am trying, extremely modestly, to push design to (at least: in some projects and actions) is to use its tools to create a democratic decision process on the decisions that should be taken by communities. But, before that, it is probably up to each of us, as individuals, to infuse his/her own understanding of technology and technological arrogance in his/her daily work. Here, we used to have this monuments to soldiers dead in operations. In a near future, we should have a monument to those workers (in Tchernobyl, Fukushima maybe, and so many elsewere) who died as soldiers fighting the 0,0001% event that turned into a real nightmare. Best regards, Jean Le 17 mars 11 à 13:23, Clive Dilnot a écrit : 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]