Climate Centric Design
It’s our twentieth newsletter! ❤️ and share
This past week we had installment four of “Wicked India,” which is another way of saying we are done with half of the course. On Tuesday, we covered “collective wisdom” in some depth; I continued the use of ‘mental hooks’ as the toolset through which we approached collective wisdom. Those of you who attended, I hope you enjoyed the class; if you didn’t make it or need a refresher, the video recording is attached below.
You will want to fast forward through the middle third, since that’s pure silence
Of the various topics we are covering in this course, collective wisdom is both the most important and the most pretentious - the transition from individual to collective wisdom is the purpose of the course as a whole!
We started that session with the 70 odd individual visions of 2030 India that you had shared as part of your homework and ended with eight group visions of the same goal. Last Tuesday was our first ‘flipped classroom’ which is to say that the class was focused on evoking and curating your insights rather than transmit knowledge from me to you. Tarini’s illustrations (like the one below 👇🏾) are graphic summaries of those insights.
A little bit more context setting: we keep saying
India Story, Climate Grammar.
That we mean by that is the following:
India is a young country with huge aspirations
Much of India remains to be imagined, let alone built
All of that future will have to be made real in the era of climate change
However, the story will always be about the needs and aspirations of Indians.
We may never mention the word climate change when we talk about agriculture, food security and nutrition, but we will have to make sure that the changing rainfall patterns and heat waves due to climate change are factored into our imagination of a food secure India and a dignified life for farmers. This is what I call climate centric design, where we embed climate change into all the systems that we want to create in the future: education systems, transportation systems, health systems and so on.
A typical example: it's raining quite a bit in South India and many parts are flooded - Hyderabad was badly hit this year. We have created urban infrastructure that doesn’t take flooding into account - we have paved over marshlands and other watersheds and the water doesn’t have a place to go - it’s now either ocean runoff (leads to water shortages) or flooding. We don’t want either. Climate-centric design means: lay roads so that water finds a place to drain and to be stored. Common sense, right?
Two Mental Hooks
Quick recap:
A mental hook is either a mental model you derive from observing the world around you (like 80% of profits come from 20% of customers) or a mental frame you impose on the world before you make any observations (like climate change impacts everything). Two mental frames below:
Agent Centric Design
There’s a tendency to think of wicked problems as existing independent of us, as ‘things out there.’ It’s particularly strong in climate change circles where we routinely says things like ‘the laws of physics don’t care about politics.’ Which is true, but at the same time, climate change wouldn’t be a matter of politics if humans weren’t involved in it in some fashion, right?
So to the extent climate change is anthropogenic, i.e., of human origin, we can't divorce physics from politics, and therefore we can't divorce the existence of people and other species in who are embedded in the system that is facing climate change.
In agentic centric design, we frame the wicked problem around the agents who are embedded in it.
They are at the centre.
And so instead of solving wicked problems directly, we focus our efforts on the minds of the agents embedded in the wicked problem. So instead of changing the food system, you would want to change the behaviors of farmers and their representatives. So change how they use fertilizers and what value they put on fertilizers. Instead of paying lots of money to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, agent centric design would say: change the consumption behaviors of the wealthy.
A more controversial way of looking at agent centric design:
If you don’t see an obvious agent in a wicked problem, it’s because you have naturalised the situation, made it as if the world just works that way. You can see that in the Indian debate over ‘merit’ vs ‘reservations.’ Merit is seen as natural and the right way to be, but it hides generations of upper caste privilege Agent centric design is as much about surfacing ‘hidden agents’ as finding new agents.
Randomness
Randomization is an extremely powerful frame; it can be hard to grasp, but very useful once you grasp it. If you remember the veil of ignorance I introduced two weeks ago - it’s a way to create just policies by hiding any knowledge of yourself, of not knowing whther you’re a man or a woman, a Dalit or a Baniya. But that can be expensive: it means having a census that outlines the various castes and classes you need to then ignore.
So instead of doing it that way, there's a hack, which is to say that you can always put yourself in the shoes of a random person in the room and see the world from their perspective. This way, you don’t need to know the range of castes in the room as a whole - just switch places with one other person. Most of you probably have heard of randomized control trials, and how RCTs have become so important, important enough that Duflo and Banerjee got the Nobel Prize recently.
Here’s a thought experiment: we have elections every five years. Enormous amounts of money and other forms of influence are expended to make those elections happen. What if you replaced the 543 individuals who fought and won the elections, with 543 random individuals and you made them MPs. Would we be:
Better off
About the same
Worse off
I would love to see your predictions alongside your reasoning in the comments.
Halfway through
We are done with half the course and I am loving the imaginations pouring out of my minds.
I will close this newsletter with a link to your collective imaginations. If you’re interested in fleshing out these scenarios, please let us know! And finally:
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