Understanding Design: The Value of Information

10/23/97

Human design of information is technology. Greater knowledge facilitates increasingly sophisticated design, allowing higher standards of living using less physical goods. This creates a fundamental contradiction between the utilization of information and markets. In a society fundamentally attuned to design, value defined by quantity becomes less important. The present attempt to leverage industrial market institutions and thought into an information based future is doomed to insolvency. The questions and processes of design will gradually become the foundation for new societal thinking and new social institutions.

In market society, the seemingly unlimited production and consumption of goods and the unlimited spectrum of growth are looked at as the best of worlds. This principle is founded in the concept of quantity value -- the more production, the more labor used, the more energy fired, the more physical goods created, -- the more healthy the economy. Market society necessitates an unending swapping of goods. A civilization of markets is bound to the Sisyphean task of unending production meeting an unending demand. Market philosophy codifies an unbridled consumer society imbibed with a conception of well-being defined by quantity.

Increased productivity, the most important measure of progress in market society, is a purely quantitative measure. Improvement in productivity is measured by gaining the same, or increasing the quantity of output, while decreasing the amount of physical labor and raw resources on the input side of the equation. However, in an information society, progress on many matters will be gaged by decreasing output. A better utilization of resources and labor will result in a decline of physical output, but still increase living standards. Obviously, this is a non-market standard.

One example of this would be energy consumption. A defining component of the industrial age has been the mass scale harnessing of energy. However, many of the processes for harnessing energy, such as the internal combustion engine, have been extremely inefficient. In many industrial systems, the energy wasted is greater than the energy utilized. Better design allows the creation of systems which use less total energy, or by harnessing the energy of the sun, totally removes the energy source as a commodity.

Any first year economics student will tell you a company wants to strive for efficiency. Cutting the amount of energy, labor, and physical goods used to produce a product is good for the bottom line. Yet, this concept of micro-corporate efficiency when applied to the macro-economy creates a contradiction. A macro-economy would be considered economically unhealthy, if through better design, it used less labor, less energy, and less physical goods.

As raw quantity becomes less valuable, the processes of design gain importance. There is a certain architecture of power designed into all technologies, and as a technology is adopted, the power of the society evolves through the technology. The more established or ubiquitous a technology, the greater the influence of its design. The power of the automobile industry, or the utility industry with its technology of centralized energy generation has been tremendous. The television created the television society. Designed into each new technology is a new pattern for society.

The first politics of design was the environmental movement. Pollution and the unhampered destruction of non-human environments had little or no negative value in a strict industrial market perspective. Alternative views were developed outside the prevalent technologies' perspective. The environmental movement questioned the design of the dominant technologies. Out of control technologies, at best, create a dulling homogeneity, as witnessed with the automobile and the post WWII American landscape.

As a society adopts a technology, its view of the world is shaped by that technology. The value of any specific technology cannot be judged from the perspective of the technology alone. Mathematician Kurt Godel's "Incompleteness Theorem" states that it is impossible for any mathematical system to prove itself from within the system itself. You must go outside the system. It would be helpful to borrow this concept for judging technology. No technology can be completely judged by the system created by the technology, nor by one specific philosophical system such as market economics. For example, a person with no understanding of computer operating systems outside of MSDOS, would conclude MSDOS to be the best system and the market would have justified that opinion.

The ever increasing flow of information will continue to create more technologies. There is no turning back. It cannot be stopped, or it might better be asked, where would you like it to stop. Shall we stop it at the use of a stick to plant a seed, or maybe with the creation of books, or better at the creation of a smallpox vaccine? The question isn't how to stop information, but how to create systems to best utilize it, which will not be accomplished with a blind faith in technology and/or markets. The power of information implementation i.e., technology, is in the design.

More information creates an increasingly complex world. Complexity is nothing new. The world, our universe is complex. The planet we live on has gone through billions of years of natural design. Each species uniquely designed. Billions of years of design has created the species Homo sapiens, which would not have evolved in a less complex environment. We are the offspring of complexity, but not of a complexity of human design. Now we are creating complexity. If technology is looked at as constantly mutating species, the question must be asked, what are the processes of selection? Will it be one philosophy? One group of individuals? One process? One value standard? There is only one thing for certain. They will be selected by us. Designed into each technology are our virtues and our limitations.

It is obvious we have not developed the philosophies or institutions to best confront this new challenge. We have information institutions, but they need to be radically reformed and new institutions or processes created. The information processing and communications architecture of present institutions are insufficient, and in many ways hostile, to a democratic information civilization. "The real challenge is changing institutional arrangements so as to better generate knowledge and transfer it. For example, pundits say that companies must learn to give incentives to employees to share their knowledge. Currently, the incentive is for employees to hoard knowledge so they become more valuable to the organization," states a recent article on evolving businesses in the New York Times. This thought should be paramount in the reform of all society's institutions.

Government has always played a crucial role in processing and communicating information. When military affairs are removed, government may be conceived entirely as an information system. Yet the structure or design of government remains firmly planted in past eras. The U.S. government's design was modeled on the Roman Republic. There has been a universe of change with the creation of new media over the past two millennia, yet the design of government remains firmly unaltered -- a dinosaur in the age of mammals.

The modern university may be looked at as the main creator of information in the Twentieth century. But the university, the entire school system more accurately, are institutions of the past. In an information intensive society, the idea behind our present education system, that information can somehow be separated from the rest of society rings increasingly hollow. Schools were designed around certain media. The two most significant being the lecture hall and the book. Education can now be accomplished with assorted media, though the future of the lecture is longer than the future of the book. The ethos of the university -- quest for knowledge, the role of the educator, and the free movement of information -- must become the ethos of the age.

Democratic processes will not operate through a non-democratic architecture. What will be the morality of information? Our current copyright and patent systems are impediments to a democratic design process and aid greatly in the establishment of oligarchic technological powers. Copyrights and patents lock in certain designs and thus certain powers. Patents and copyrights must be reformed and would best be done away with for their future detriment far outweighs their once perceived usefulness.

After Marshall McLuhan, we can no longer misconstrue the significance of new technologies, or as he labeled it -- new media. Each medium's design defines a view of life and then shapes a civilization's view of the world, some as significantly as the fables or myths of the past once did. In fact, media -- the book, the automobile, or the microprocessor -- become not simply a part of civilization, but the civilization itself. In the future, every aspect of human existence from the seeds we plant to stellar vehicles, even our very selves will be impacted by human design. Each design of our physical world has a correlated impact on our minds. In some cases, technology becomes a shackle -- a velvet bedecked shackle, but a shackle none the less.

Civilization must be restructured with the understanding that the creation, processing, communication, and the design of information are its most important features. Markets and market culture will not disappear, but they will become increasingly less influential. The institutions and culture which formed agrarian civilization did not appear overnight, nor those of market civilization. Today, we are steeped in market institutions and culture -- malls, corporations, banks, and the job. They have all evolved over the last several hundred years. We now must begin creating the culture and institutions of information and a politics of design.