Dear Jean and Clive,

Nuclear power stations are 'complicated' (very complicated!)  rather than
'complex'. 

One of the main issues for designers is to remove feedback loops from the
technology. That is, to ensure as much as possible that complexity does not
affect either the intended action of the system or its failure. Things are
designed to  be simply sequential both in action and failure.

The failures that occurred were simply sequential (the water stopped the
electrical system---that stopped the cooling system etc...)

A complicated design  and a complicated system yes- very.  The mode of
failure - *not even* very complicated.  Complex design issues in the
technology - no.

Some might claim the public political human side of the decision-making may
be complex. Likely failures on the human side are likely hardly even
'complicated'. For example Bloomberg report there are problems in
independence of judgement in setting criteria for design and safety of
nuclear reactors
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=awR8KsLlAcSo). 

From looking at this situation, the answer to Clive's question about what
the Fukushima failures mean in a general way for ' the construction,
operation and implication(s) of complex systems?', would seem to be - not at
all.   Though it probably gives some new insights into how to better deal
with complications.

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 Jean
Schneider
Sent: Friday, 18 March 2011 10:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Status of "design" re Japanese nuclear crisis?

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
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