Section Notes 7 “Wicked Reasoning”
Gavin visits Casey in DellVille on his way to an international environmental meeting, hoping she will eventually join him in his activism. Casey adapts Gavin’s Whisperer to manage information during meetings where diverse conversations overcome his reduced hearing.
Marilyn is now de facto Team 3G leader after her success with the Punk Page Podcast. Continuing their efforts to restore pre-WWW ideas, Casey and Gavin match the principles of “wicked design problems” with privacy and surveillance capitalism.
A few weeks later, Sally visits DellVille to celebrate the opening of a Vision Loss center. Casey carries forward the messages of her friend.
Keywords: wicked problem; information mapping; design rationale; issue-based; groupware; privacy; surveillance capitalism; animal communities; environmental noise; walkable cities.
History: issue-driven design; Horst Rittel; MCC Software program; Group Systems; the age of surveillance capitalism; “Watership Down”, Douglas Adams.
- ““Wicked Problems” (Wikipedia) are a class of problems, studied in the 1980s by Berkeley Professor Horst Rittel. Examples include California wildfires as a wicked problem.
- IBIS = “Issue-based Information Systems” is a way of representing arguments and reasoning about complex problems, notably “design rationale”. A modern technique is “Dialogue Mapping .
- “Groupware” is often referred to as “Collaborative software” (Wikipedia). Using technology successfully within meetings required prepared facilitation, total concentration by attendees, and a willing management hierarchy.
- Gavin may be referring to story “Degrees of Freedom” in collection “Hieroglyph” by Canadian futurist Karl Shroeder. This “design fiction” article addresses group decision making on an environmental problem involving First Nations land and people.
- The Software Technology Program within the MCC research Consortium in Austin Texas experimented with IBIS and Groupware in the context of upstream problems of software development.
- Richard Adams authored “Water ship Down” (Wikipedia), a novel illustrating group decision making and complex environments.
- NYC regulates dangerous sidewalk signs illustrates safety qualities for less hazardous walkable cities.
- The Controversy Discovery Engine is a template that prepares searches in Google by appending vocabulary terms related to ‘conspiracy’. This expanded query forces Google to drill down through the Organizational Web into the Analytic Web to find substantive articles on a topic in the main query. Pursuing the query results may expose negative, controversial, or contradictory points of view.
Appendix B contains a version of the Controversy Discovery Engine for copying into an executable preface to a search engine.
- Sally Rhodes’ “Disability Explainer” is Appendix A.
A Chip On Her Shoulder 