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
- The Big Sentence
- Design from Mistrust
- Contrarian or Kook
- Help me Feed the Big Fungus
- How I Became Aware of Contrarians
- Principles of Design from Trust
- Design from Trust Requires Thoughtful Design
- Trust as Policy
- Conclusions from Starting with Trust
- Wikipedia
- Introducing My Contrarians
- The Queue
- Contrarian John Taylor Gatto
- Patterns My Contrarians Share
- How to Develop Your World View
- My Innovations
- Not Naïve Trust
- Contrarian Hans Monderman
- Contrarian Christopher Alexander
- Contrarian Overview
- Behind the Reel - Design from Trust
- Contrarians Who Make (or Made) Sense
- One GenAI Scenario
- Jerry's Theory of Change
- Design from Trust (NeoBook)
- Contrarian Elinor Ostrom
- Contrarian Harrison Owen
- Pull on This Thread
- Assume Good Faith
- The Big Picture