Social Planning: Design Considerations for Changing Society

Due to strong interest in this topic, "Social Planning: Design Considerations for Changing Society" will be repeated on Saturday June 14th (follow this link to RSVP) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/187597782/). Since the version on the 14th is easier to get into, please RSVP to it if your schedule permits.

What are the design issues to be considered when planning improvements for society? What is the primary unit of social planning? The nation-state? The organization? Values? Memes? Something else? What data can be used for planning the future of society? Given that humans tend to be disastrously wrong in almost all their forecasting and prognostication, is social design doomed to random results because the data from our predictions is so erroneous? What did the US Constitution get right that Plato, Sir Thomas More, and Karl Marx got wrong?

Who is the client of social design? Is society rightfully the client for all professional activity? When designing society, what adaptations are appropriate in considering time and space (given that here and now usually trump 100 or 1000 years from now)? Given that it is reasonable to imagine society continuing in perpetuity, how do we design without a final goal?

These questions are inspired by Chapter 6 in the penetrating, influential, and important book "The Sciences of the Artificial, Third Edition" by Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001). Simon was one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century and recipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics. See the publisher's web site for more information about Simon's book by following this link (http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sciences-artificial). Note appropriate topics from the rest of Simon's book will be included in the discussion which will focus on Chapter 6 "Social Planning".

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/imagecache/booklist_node/9780262691918.jpg

This meetup is one in a series that I have organized about various aspects of design. Here are links to the previous discussions I have organized on this subject:

• Engineering Failures & Society (8 May 2011) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/17217567)

• The Nature of Technology (8 July 2012) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/43823422)

• The Essential Engineer (13 Jan 2013) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/90830862)

• Design Thinking (9 Mar 2013) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/98153372)

• Are Culture, Art and Design better ways to change society? (9 Jun 2013) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/116301992)

• Technology and Invention in Finance (16 Feb 2014) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/160217332)

• Design and the Sciences of the Artificial (13 April 2014) (https://www.meetup.com/thinkingsociety/events/168945862/)