Politics by Design
We are political animals, though not the only ones who are so. We are also philosophical animals. Aristotle starts his Metaphysics with the claim "All humans by nature desire to know." The challenges of collective living has been a concern of philosophy from the very beginning.
How do we rise to the occasion?
In the intellectual's version of politics, a great human first thinks of the ideal society and its rules of governance and then a few lesser humans implement that vision in a territory they come to control. Marx and Lenin are the modern archetypes of that division of labour. In the romantic view of politics, a great hero or savior conquers a territory and then scholars and bureaucrats are seduced (coerced?) into setting up the rules of governance in that region. That would be Chandragupta and Kautilya, or Alexander and the Gordian knot.
Today, we want to offer a third approach to politics and its philosophy, one that rejects both the ideal is better than real and the real is better than ideal oppositions. Instead, let's imagine politics as a site for design.
Design what?
Designing rules and norms, designing institutions, designing trust... the list is endless, and philosophy has a specific role to play in designing politics.
Philosophy should serve as a design system for politics.
If you have heard the term ‘design system’ and the term ‘philosophy’ but never the two in the same phrase, you might be wondering what one has to say about the other.
Watch this video if you want the quick version of this week’s Messenger.
Design Systems 101
We usually hear the phrase 'design system' in the user experience or product design world. A design system is a comprehensive collection of guidelines, standards, and best practices used to guide the design and development of products within an organization. It typically includes:
1. Components and Patterns: Reusable UI elements, such as buttons, forms, and modals, and design patterns that provide solutions to common design challenges.
2. Style Guide: Defines the visual language of a product, including typography, color palettes, spacing, and grid systems.
3. Usage Guidelines: Instructions on how and when to use certain components and design patterns.
4. Design Principles: Foundational ideas that guide the design decisions within the organization.
5. Design Tools and Resources: This could include design tokens, icons, and other assets that designers and developers can use.
6. Documentation: Clear instructions, examples, and possibly even code snippets for developers to integrate the design into the product.
7. Accessibility Guidelines: Best practices to ensure that products are usable by everyone, including those with disabilities.
The main benefits of a design system include:
- Consistency: Ensures a consistent look and feel across all products and platforms.
- Efficiency: Reduces design and development time by using standardized components and patterns.
- Scalability: Makes it easier to update and add new features or components.
- Collaboration: Provides a common language between designers, developers, and other stakeholders.
- Inclusivity: By adhering to accessibility guidelines, products are usable by a broader audience.
In essence, a design system acts as a single source of truth for both designers and developers, streamlining the process of creating and maintaining digital products. Popular design systems in the user experience world include Google's Material Design, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and IBM's Carbon Design System.
So much for design systems. What does any of this have to do with philosophy or politics?
We aren't here to design buttons or forms. We are here to design deliberative spaces and negotiations of power. How might a design system help in that effort? Socratus has been working on these questions - tacitly, not explicitly - for a while now. We believe 'design system thinking' will help us clarify our work, and make it a a public resource by making it consistent, efficient, collaborative etc, i.e., all the benefits that accrue from following a design system. Let's take a look at how we might go about doing so, starting with designing for citizenship, since that's what we have worked on the most.
Citizenship by Design
Summary for the impatient: citizenship starts with design, not definition.
Socratus was founded on the faith that evoking collective wisdom is the way to address complex systems challenges. Wicked problems, as we call them. But whose wisdom? Over the last four years, we have come to the realization that it is the citizen whose wisdom we need to evoke, that even when an expert or a powerful person is in the room, they are citizens first, and therefore, the same as everyone else.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "a citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. We can either take that definition for granted or subject it to questioning. Our path is the path of questioning. Let’s take a closer look at the definition. It outlines a political community with two constituent parts:
1. Citizenship is always relative to a political community
2. One aspect of citizenship is about membership in the political community
3. Another aspect of citizenship is about the rights and duties in that political community
We are never born alone. We are born into a community. We have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that arise from the accident of being born where we were born. While we can’t control fate, it sure would be nice to set up rules and institutions that promote our welfare. Some of us like to design utopias, an ideal society. We wear that hat on special occasions, but our daily grind is making the world a better place.
Our design brief: given a political community X, design spaces in which we can collectively evoke rules, norms and institutions that promote flourishing.
What is a political community?
A political community, often referred to as a political society or political entity, is a group of people who are organized under a common government or authority within a defined geographic territory. This community shares a set of political institutions, laws, and often a system of governance that helps maintain order, resolve conflicts, and make collective decisions on matters affecting the community.
Examples of political communities include nation-states like the United States, France, and China, as well as smaller political entities like cities and municipalities. Political communities can vary greatly in terms of size, structure, and the degree of autonomy they possess within a larger political framework (e.g., federal systems or confederations). The concept of a political community is fundamental to the study of political science and the organization of societies and governments around the world.
That definition is an onion. Lots of tears ahead, for it leaves the notions of membership, rights, and duties undefined. Some of the questions it spawns are:
1. What is government?
2. What is authority?
3. What is territory?
4. What is an institution, and what is a law?
Trying to define all those terms will take us down a long and winding road with no end. One solution that avoids infinite regress is to define each term in practice rather than in theory. We may not be able to define territory in the abstract, but as we roam the streets of Bangalore, we may accept the territory in consideration is Shanti Nagar ward. Operational definitions (such as that of territory above) are common in science.
an operational definition is a specific and concrete definition of a variable or concept that is used in a way that allows it to be measured, observed, or manipulated in a practical and measurable manner. Operational definitions are particularly important in scientific research and experimentation because they provide clear guidelines for how to assess or work with abstract or complex concepts.
While conducting our work, we might define a citizen operationally as: a citizen is an adult person with voting rights and a residence within the boundaries of Shanti Nagar. That operational definition removes any uncertainty about the concepts that matter. It defines political community and membership as:
1. Political Community: Shanti Nagar Ward (its territory) with its municipal councilor and the ward council (its authority and institution).
2. Criterion of membership + rights and duties: adult with voting rights.
Is this good enough?
It is for some purposes and not for others. If you want to survey likely voters on their party preferences, the definition is a good start. If you want to understand their needs for good education, it most definitely doesn't. The definition excludes children - surely a group with a stake in education. It also excludes adults without voting rights in that geography - migrants, for example. They too, have a stake in their children's education and should be given a voice.
This leads to a dilemma: a one-size-fits-all definition is too loose, and tighter definitions leave out important constituencies. What is to be done?
Definitions have another problem - by freezing the meaning of a term and making the state or some other institution the custodian of the frozen definition, we run the risk of
handing over power that should belong to the people and
holding change on the ground hostage to change in the halls of power.
Note: change isn't always good. Courts can act as custodians of constitutional virtues even as popular sentiment turns against them.
The designer might tell the philosopher “that’s a you problem.” They might say: instead of starting with a definition, let's treat citizenship as a design problem with constraints coming from ground realities. Citizenship in a city has different design constraints than citizenship in a nation-state. In the first instance, we want citizens to have some rights and duties regarding urban infrastructure, such as water pipes, driving rules, etc. In the second instance, we may focus more on abstract rights and duties, including equal treatment under the law and the right to marriage. In designing for citizenship:
1. Geography matters.
2. Trust and solidarity matter.
3. Freedom matters.
To which we can add a design principle:
The Principle of Generosity: design institutions, laws and infrastructure to include as many relevant stakeholders as possible.
The principle of generosity nudges us into including children and migrants in the design of the local school system. We can add other related design principles to the mix, such as the principle of accessibility:
Principle of Accessibility: institutions designed for a political community should be accessible, both literally and metaphorically, to everyone.
The Street Theatre of Citizenship
Arguably, the superstructure of politics has already been subjected to an extended process of design and design review. The Indian constitution was adopted only after the constituent assembly met for over three years, from December 1946 to January 1950. The members of that assembly didn’t think of their work as that of design, but you could argue that’s what they did: borrowing elements from existing constitutions, subjecting those norms to scrutiny, adapting those norms to the needs of a newly independent nation etc.
Not design, but not not design either.
Nothing like the constituent assembly exists for the everyday practice of collective living. For better or worse, citizenship is negotiated moment to moment on our streets, in our schools and everywhere else where people have to negotiate power. The street theatre of citizenship desperately needs our designerly attention. As space designers, we want to design spaces for citizenship wherever people find themselves and not just in officially designated citizenship locations, such as the voting booth or the chambers of parliament.
That's particularly important when negotiating solutions to wicked problems, for it's extremely unlikely that one negotiation space at one administrative level ( whether ward, city, state or country) is enough. Instead, we have to design nested spaces of citizenship where the meaning of the term changes as we enter different spaces with their specific needs.
Socratus has been tacitly doing so from the first Janta Ka Faisla onward. How do you design for citizenship in the small spaces that we occupy: on the street, in the city, in the market? How can we be citizens first in all of these settings? This is our challenge. This is what we'll be talking about over the coming weeks as we tell the story of our interactions across India in the rural agenda, in our work with tribal communities in Rajasthan and other efforts that Socratus is undertaking to address citizenship as the key attribute to be cultivated in the face of wicked problems.