 One
of the challenges with complex systems is that understanding of the
problem and solution co-evolve -- you can't determine root causes, you
can't identify all the variables that affect the outcomes, and you
can't predict what will happen. That makes it hard to 'solve' problems
like global warming, world poverty, violence, corporatism, unaffordable
health care and dysfunctional education systems.
What makes it
even harder is that we often don't know what we need -- what the
'future state' would look like if we 'solved' the problem. When it
comes to global warming, for example, some see the ideal future as one
of strict conservation, while others see it as one of miraculous new
technologies that allow energy consumption to increase forever. It's
hard to figure out how to get there when you can't even agree on the
destination.
The School for Designing a Society focuses the attention of activist groups on collectively answering the questions "What are you for?" and "What would you consider a desirable society?", questions that identify the destination, the future state, before attempting to prescribe a way to get there.
Matt Dineen at Passions and Survival interviewed the School's ecological design instructor, Rob Scott. He said that the school's objective is to go beyond available alternatives.
In our modern world of horrific imaginative poverty, solutions are
presented to us as dichotomies: Party A or Party B, socialism or
capitalism, SUV or hybrid, Brand X or Brand Y. All these 'choices',
which are not really choices at all, have the effect of focusing us on
the available alternatives, and precluding consideration of other
possibilities that don't currently exist, but could exist.
As
globalization succeeds in McDonaldizing the planet, these limited
available alternatives become ubiquitous, and it becomes harder and
harder to find, or imagine, additional possibilities: a society without
political parties, a gift economy, a world where cars are unneeded,
buying NoLogo products from people we know and trust.
By
starting with an imagined Future State, one not directly or obviously
connected to the Current State, we open ourselves up to additional
possibilities, beyond available alternatives.
The problem is,
we are now so rooted to the Current State and its limited choices that
in imagining the Future State we subconsciously start with the Current
State and linearly, incrementally design the Future State from there.
In so doing, we short circuit the innovation process.
Because we
have forgotten how to imagine, we no longer know what is possible, and
therefore, we no longer know what we need. The iPod was the product of
imagination -- if you asked people in the days of vinyl and cassette
tapes how they would like the distribution of recorded music improved,
you would have received responses anchored to the Current State of the
time: make records unscratchable; make cassettes that you don't have to
turn over to play the other side.
So the School is a great idea.
But only if its enrollees either haven't forgotten how to imagine, or
have relearned to do so. My guess is that imaginative people are a tiny
minority, and in the fracas of a brainstorming session with the huge
majority of unimaginative people, they would be drowned out. They
wouldn't be heard. The vast majority could not imagine
what they were talking about. Suppose it was you, in 1970, surrounded
by a pile of disks and people invested hugely in them, imagining a
future where all music could be downloaded free over the airwaves, in
seconds, onto a device that would hold your whole music collection in
your breast pocket. Can you hear the laughter?
How do we re-learn to imagine, so we know what we really need? I've already written about that.
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