Design from Trust
(draft) A hopeful path out of our current polycrisis.
Unfortunately, for years we've been designing our systems from a basis of mistrust of the average human. This has led to a bunch of systems we take for granted that are coercive and not very effective, such as the compulsory education system.
Outcomes would be so much better if we started with an assumption that most people — not all people — have good intent. And that if we optimize the systems we design for the people with good intent and worry about the bad actors later, we can provide terrific solutions to a whole series of problems that have been dogging us for decades.
If you've been watching the news of late, this is clearly a long shot. At least at the global scale.
But at the small, local scale, it's been happening all over the place in tiny increments.
Here are some places to start understanding Design from Trust:
I'm writing a NeoBook about Design from Trust . It's nowhere near done, but you are in it now.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.
Pages that link to this page
- Assume Good Faith
- Trust as Policy
- Pull on This Thread
- Contrarian Christopher Alexander
- Design from Trust (NeoBook)
- Introducing My Contrarians
- Conclusions from Starting with Trust
- How to Develop Your World View
- Help me Feed the Big Fungus
- The Queue
- One GenAI Scenario
- Contrarian Hans Monderman
- Contrarian or Kook
- Principles of Design from Trust
- The Big Sentence
- Behind the Reel - Design from Trust
- Patterns My Contrarians Share
- Design from Trust Requires Thoughtful Design
- Contrarians Who Make (or Made) Sense
- How I Became Aware of Contrarians
- Contrarian Overview
- Contrarian Harrison Owen
- The Big Picture
- Not Naïve Trust
- Jerry's Theory of Change
- My Innovations
- Contrarian John Taylor Gatto
- Wikipedia
- Design from Mistrust
- Contrarian Elinor Ostrom