Rosan,

You have indeed clarified the issue in explaining your position. You
argued against analysis or research as a key preliminary step in policy
design. To support your argument, or so it seemed, you wrote:

“Acknowledgement: My thinking on this is very much influenced by
Jonas and Harold Nelson, who, I believe, are influenced by Horst
Rittel.”

I asked how Rittel’s views suggest that analysis is not important,
and I challenged your view of participatory design.

You reply that “… intellectual influences take different forms. It is
not what Rittel said or wrote, but his, let me call it, intellectual
posture that I see reflected in Jonas and Harold. Rittel, in my humble
opinons, was an original thinker with a good sense of humour and liked
to turn upside down our beliefs.”

Essentially, you are saying that Rittel’s IDEAS don’t influence
your views on this. You state that Rittel’s personality traits
influence you – a sense of humor and an interest in turning beliefs
upside down. Unless you knew Rittel, of course, you seem to derive your
view of Rittel’s personality via two other scholars. This doesn’t
involve what Rittel said or wrote, but it doesn’t matter because none
of this involves the issues in your post.

While your own intellectual posture is now clear, I remain puzzled. One
of the beliefs that Rittel attempted to turn upside down was that we
could plan without analysis. Rittel’s IBIS (Issue-Based Information
System) was a device designed to support policy planning by improving
analysis. Rittel’s intentions are clear.

You write: “One, of course, must read Rittel very carefully,”

Now I’m not saying you must read Rittel carefully on every point, but
I am saying that you ought to read him carefully enough to understand
him on the point you address. On this point, his view is different to
yours.

Remember the issue here: the thread involved policy. That means goals,
plans, and strategies together with enabling laws, treaties, and
regulations, followed by programs and tactics to implement them. This
thread began with your response to Derek Miller. You quote Derek:

“We fully recognize that the learning process is always iterative and
on-going, but one needs to model with the things on the table. That
means, someone needs to put the stuff on the table. Research puts data
(or the interpretive frameworks, etc) on the table for use in modeling,
scenario building, prototyping, etc. This is the ‘raw stuff’ we
design with. Not clay or paper or metal.”

You argue that the material of Derek’s work consists of existing
international policy and programs. That’s not necessarily true, and
this notion is wrong in several dimensions. First, in policy planning,
one key factor is to understand the effects of past policy to see why
(or whether) one needs a new policy. If current policy is not working as
it should work, the next step is to plan a better policy. 

Nevertheless, the material of policy design is not past policy or
current policy. A policy is not an artifact like a lump of clay or an
appliance. The effects of policy are quite real in their influence on
human beings, but policy itself is a mental model cast in the form of
laws, treaties, and regulations, followed by a series of processes that
take place through implementation programs and tactics. 

Policy planning is a strategic process, a case of strategic design.
Policy generally fits within a larger governmental or organizational
strategy. This is why different governments and different political
parties shape different policies.

But policies become durable when governments build institutions around
policy decisions. These institutions and the people who manage and staff
them form the body of government at the civil service level or at the
level of government organizations, service agencies, government-funded
public organizations, government-funded QUANGOs and NGOs. 

Such institutions exist in nearly every nation. In many cases, these
institutions embody policy decisions made so long ago that no one even
remembers the debates surrounding the creation of the original
policies.

Consider the social security system in most advanced nations today.
Otto von Bismarck created the first such system, establishing social
security and pensions for somewhat different reasons to those that
Germany uses in maintaining them. In some respects, of course, the
reason is the same: social welfare is a key element of national
strength. 

In the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill played a decisive role in
develop the British social security system around such elements as
old-age pensions and a job-finding service for the unemployed when he
worked as President of the Board of Trade (1908-1910), and then as Home
Secretary (1910-1911). Churchill did so for reasons we can readily
understand today. As it happened, Prime Minister David Lloyd-George got
most of the credit for the reforms, and many other people played key
roles, but the debate started long before and some policy problems were
culturally embedded in laws dating back to the reign of Henry VII. The
modern debate began in 1905, leading to a Royal Commission that
published two reports, one for a majority view and one for a minority
view. Lloyd-George’s government took the opportunity to ignore both
views shaping a new system, one that did not exist before they planned
it. In this sense, Churchill, Lloyd-George, and their colleagues
designed policy, creating something that did not exist before. They
worked from ideas and mental models of what could be rather than working
from the stuff of existing policy.

You quoted Derek a second time, where he wrote:

“Designing - as use the term - is more akin to ‘modeling’ than
‘thinking.’ One models ‘with stuff.’ That means, you need the
stuff first. If the stuff is socio-cultural knowledge, then research
precedes the process. It may also support it and follow it, and it may
go round and round, but it is not chicken and egg. First comes a
strategic goal, then the knowledge, then the modeling, then the
prototyping, etc.”

Differences in terminology mean that people use such words as modeling
and thinking in different ways. Nevertheless, Derek is speaking about
models built of knowledge, ideas expressed through words. This involves
using the human capacity for language to imagine and model the likely
results of possible future actions. In this sense, one creates a model
before making a project.

Projecting a policy and prototyping on the run is exactly what not to
do. The kinds of things we work with when we work with policy are
large-scale. Policies typically involve many people – entire
organizations, regions, and groups of citizens. Policy design typically
requires horizons of several years, and the figures involved may run
from millions to trillions of dollars. 

A new policy or a policy change in a single organization such as a
university or a large business may involve hundreds or thousands of
people and millions of dollars. Government policies affect thousands to
millions of people, depending on the unit of government, and they may
cost several millions to hundreds of millions. They may cost billions of
dollars for large national policies in large nations. Some policies,
such as the Bush-era tax laws and regulatory policies involved trillions
of dollars and helped pave the way to the global financial crisis. To be
fair, Bush did not do this alone. Several problems were rooted in
earlier policy decisions, but the Bush policy program changed the
context dramatically and exacerbated the situation. Some Bush policies,
such as the war in Iraq, required trillions of dollars, destroyed
countless lives, while shaping problems yet to be solved.

More policy problems exist on local scales than national simply because
there are more of them, but they all arise through an inability to
understand context, culture, and the wide variety of challenge we face
in designing policy to address issues.

It makes sense to generate rapid prototypes when we consider individual
objects. Quick and dirty prototyping is a way to get started and an
effective way to model the stuff we work with. That’s the logic of
Pelle Ehn’s cardboard computer interfaces. That is the system at the
Aalto Design Factory, where students try out projects on a rapid,
iterative basis. It is also the case for Larry Leifert’s students in
the ME310 course at Stanford. 

Things become a more difficult when products are embedded in
large-scale systems, whether these are operating systems or service and
supply systems. Even then, however, rapid projection may help and one
can test prototypes for likely actions and interactions.

With policy, things are different. It is possible to project and test
some elements of policy, but this requires deep knowledge in such fields
as psychology, anthropology, operations management, logistics, or
behavioral economics. Few designers have the requisite skills for policy
design, and none of these few got their research training in an art
school.

Your advice on how to design policy comes from a lack of knowledge: you
don’t know the field, and you don’t know what you don’t know. A
doctorate from an art university doesn’t equip you to offer advice on
policy design.

You missed the point of my request that you demonstrate how you used
Rittel. Now that you have clarified the point, I understand that my
question had no bearing on the thread: Rittel and the others did not
influence your thinking on the topic of policy design. They influenced
you because of what you perceive as their “intellectual posture.”
You admire what you see as a sense of humor and an interest in turning
beliefs upside down. This kind of influence was irrelevant to the
content of your post.

Your original post seemed to position the ideas of Jonas, Nelson, and
Rittel as an intellectual warrant for your position. Now, in a post
titled “intellectual influences,” you make clear that this was not
the case. So, yes, you’ve made it clear. 

What was not clear in your advice to Derek was that you weren’t
drawing on the sources you acknowledge. You were merely using them as
loose inspiration. Let me be precise on this: Jonas was the Korreferent
on your PhD thesis at . You have written several times with Jonas as
co-author. I acknowledge Jonas’s influence on your ideas and the
probability that you are interpreting his views correctly. In asking for
a clear reference, I was asking you to provide the warrant for your use
of Rittel. Now that you explain that you were not using him this way,
there is no point to the question.

But my request for clarity is relevant to another point. If you explain
a position where you draw on sources external to your argument, it helps
to allow your readers to judge for themselves whether you are making
responsible use of the sources. If these are not sources, of course, but
good-humored role models tacked to your bulletin board rather like the
famous picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue, there’s no point
asking for the warrant.

This does raise a different and more serious question. On what basis
are you offering advice on policy design? I see none, and that’s what
I would like to have seen. 

You haven’t made an argument for your views. You’ve simply put your
opinion forward. This is a discussion list and not a peer-reviewed
journal, so we are permitted to make off-the-cuff comments without
experience or an intellectual foundation in the topic on which we hold
forth. We’re also permitted to ask questions and raise challenges when
that happens.

Policy design is a difficult and serious business. Unlike one-off art
objects or small-scale manufactured objects, policy design has major
consequences for the people involved as clients of good policy and as
victims of bad policy. Having done policy work myself for seven
governments and many organizations, I am aware of the requirement. 

Before concluding, I’ll state my limits. The kinds of policy I worked
with are not as serious in their implications as the kinds of policy
Derek and his group work with. If I get something wrong, a government
agency may be less successful in its mission than otherwise. If I do
things well, it may mean improvements to the economy, or to work-flow in
an organization, or it may mean my university will be more successful in
its mission. Now that is saying a great deal. And even getting it wrong
here makes a huge difference to the lives of those who feel the adverse
effects of poor policy design. Nevertheless, Derek works on a different
level. If governments get maritime security wrong, the global economy is
at risk, nations suffer, and people die. The same olds true for the
kinds of security needs and international conflict issues with which
Derek works.

If you get a prototype wrong, you scrap it and go again. No harm done,
and you win valuable knowledge through rapid prototyping. If a model
doesn’t work in your CAD projection, you tinker with it until it is
ready to prototype. This is not the case with policy design.

If it seems that I thought your advice to Derek was glib and
uninformed, I did. I have done policy work, and I know what his kind of
policy work entails. While everyone has the right to an opinion, not all
opinions are of equal value. In some cases, poorly informed opinions are
dangerous. This is the case in policy design.

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design