Design for Democracy

“Design for Excellence” is a family of methodologies for achieving various goals when designing a product.

For instance, “Design for Assembly” is about making it easy to put products together from parts, such as by only requiring few tools or through clear instructions. Think of IKEA furniture.

“Design for Supply Chain” instead prioritizes logistics, such as through efficient packing or by using widespread materials. Tetra Pak cartons are a good example, their shape allowing them to stack better than round bottles.

Given its origins in product design, it is no surprise that “Design for Excellence” is operating within the logic of commercial products manufactured by private companies to eventually be sold to consumers. Each methodology in the family essentially provides employees with tools for streamlining business processes, and more broadly for working through obstacles to profitability.

What principles, then, could result in systems optimized instead for shared ownership, whose structure invites community governance and resists power concentration? How can we architect systems that enable citizen participation and cooperation by design?

Say you have a side project, and I have a side project. What if our projects made up the two sides of a shared whole, each coming at it from a different angle? What happens when the side projects of even more people connect to trace the contour of something bigger, each one of us excited about a piece of the puzzle? The art, the technology, the people. What are the right conditions for nurturing “collective passion projects” that scale gracefully with the energy channeled into them?

Any genuine challenge to established practice will necessarily come from its margins rather than its core. Today, the margin largely lies in the evenings and on the weekends, in the “third places” that are neither home nor office. Genuine challenges cannot not come from combined side projects, because if they could have been one’s main, socially acceptable occupation, then they never were genuine challenges in the first place.

Side projects need to compose well if they are to stack. The key principle here is tolerance. Just as circuits can be designed to be forgiving enough to accommodate components with a wide range of properties, initiatives can be designed to accommodate skills and passions of all shapes and sizes. And instead of wrapping everything in shiny polish, we should instead lay bare what things are made of under the hood. “Truth to materials.” Show the patchwork of computer parts salvaged from different sources, do not obscure it with a uniform enclosure. Show the patchwork of authentic people with different backgrounds, do not obscure it with sanitized marketing.

Certain systems can be said to be able to run on citizens, in that they can thrive on their combined contributions, and their contributions alone if need be. Only systems that can run on citizens can genuinely be run by citizens.

Companies turn raw ingredients into products. In go the labor, equipment, or materials, out comes the device, app, or asset. Zoom in on the transformation, however, and you find many smaller ones. This team is turning their software into a list of security issues. That team is turning that vulnerability catalogue into more secure software. This other team is turning that improved version into new marketing materials.

For such a system to instead thrive on the mixed and sporadic contributions of citizens with diverse backgrounds and motivations, it needs to have modularity, granularity, and composability at its core. Workshops are the ideal atom here, short series of sessions as building blocks.

For instance, the community around a neighborhood cluster may run a workshop focused on turning older computers into individual components by disassembling and cataloguing them. Another workshop may independently focus on turning such salvaged parts into larger, unified servers by building custom frames and figuring out the power schematics. Yet another workshop might turn such community practices into art to promote the initiative across the neighborhood.

These sessions should run whenever enough people want to take part in them, and should run at a time picked to fit everyone in the group. Besides helping people contribute to a shared effort, workshops should be designed so as to help them gain new skills, leave their mark, make new friends, and have fun together.

There is this “self-hosted” genre of software that aims to match the features of proprietary platforms, yet can run on anyone’s hardware. You can run a Nextcloud server on your computer as a self-hosted alternative to Google Drive, a Plex server instead of Netflix, the list goes on. The technical sophistication of self-hosted software is impressive.

Less impressive is the social and political sophistication typically reached in self-hosting. There is often just that, a self that is hosting services for themselves to use. Occasionally, these services are extended to accommodate the host’s spouse, and perhaps their close family. In most cases, however, there remains the solitary administrator whose responsibility is to steward the infrastructure. They have the keys to get in and the know-how to debug issues.

But one self can only get so far, and arguably not far enough as to unseat the established platforms for their modest userbase. Self-hosting in the explicit sense falls short of the breadth of knowledge, the on-call reliability, and the sheer energy required to genuinely reclaim key technology. We need to move towards what one might call “selves-hosting,” an alternative narrative that replaces the solitary basement-dweller with a welcoming community that runs its own neighborhood cluster to serve its members, young and old.

Education should not be about isolating people in an institutional daycare for over a decade. It should be about creating contexts for them to become part of living initiatives in ways that accommodate their growing skills and allow them to learn from mistakes.

In systems optimized for community ownership, manufacturing and assembly become one and the same process of building what is needed. There is no sanitized handover from production plant to consumer home, as self-sufficient communities are those that can satiate their own needs.

Objects should have an easy way of being built. The baseline process should preferably not require things that spin really fast, such as drills. Nor should it require things that shine really bright, such as lasers. Nor should it require things that get really hot, such as solder. Nor should it require things that involve toxic fumes, such as certain plastics. At the same time, people should be welcome to go the extra mile if they feel ready. Lower the floor to welcome novices, but encourage veterans to have fun raising the ceiling.

It is a good thing to have multiple ways of obtaining the same object. You can build a corner bracket layer-by-layer by stacking filament, or by milling it out of a block, or by casting it into a mold. Maybe you already have it lying around, bought or salvaged. Case in which, do use it. The point is to get what you need, and building is just a means of doing it. Though always preserve the option to build, keep the door open. Efficiency without resilience is myopia.

Objects should also invite disassembly. This reduces the effective cost of building things, as they can later be reassembled into new things. Disassembly also makes it easier to undo mistakes, and so lowers the bar for trying things. Skipping power tools tends to help with this, as chances are that if you needed one for assembly, you will also need one for disassembly.

Like many familiar building blocks of computing, passwords are soaked in our culture of individualism and estrangement. The key grants you access to a private space, the personal account. From this place, you may further be authorized to take certain actions by a higher-up, or someone who otherwise has the authority to grant you permission to do so.

How different would computing feel if important actions were authorized not down the chain of command, but rather through the presence of a quorum of equals? Say any five members of the community running a neighborhood cluster have to connect their secure tokens in order to gain elevated privileges on the system. If the number falls below the required quota, the privileged session terminates. These physical tokens may even be embedded in a bracelet or necklace, as tangible artifacts that signify community.

Secret sharing is the flavor of cryptography focused on distributing keys in such a way that any group can reveal the secret as long as they reach the quorum. Say there are three people and the intended quorum is two. First, pick four points on a line. Second, share the two coordinates of a different point with each person. Finally, give everyone the first coordinate of the remaining point. The remaining coordinate is the secret. Any two people can reconstruct the line using their own two points and read off the second coordinate of the remaining point. The password is effectively placed “in superposition” across people, enabling new social modes.

Imagine an organization that exposes the same “interface” to the outside world as your average company. You can buy things from it, you can sell things to it. But when it comes to its internal architecture, the typical hierarchy is discarded. Each member instead gets an equal say in what the organization’s priorities are and how they are tackled. If they do choose to be represented by others, they get to elect these leaders democratically for a given term.

These organizations exist today, and have for ages. Almost one in eight people globally are members of such organizations, and about one in three in the European Union. They create trillions in value annually. They are called cooperatives, or “co-ops” for short, and there is something remarkable about how these companies enshrine democratic governance and shared ownership in their very statutes.