Thesis Paper Problem

From MediaFranca

Civic Disengagement and Design responsibility

The last three decades have been ones of precipitous decline in the civic health in western societies in general. Whether measured by participation in community affairs, voter turnout, trust in institutions or people, the quality of public discourse, or attention to and knowledge of public affairs, people appear increasingly disconnected from each other and from public life.

Engaging youth is important for reasons connected to the past, present and future. First, young people (from teenagers to young adults) have traditionally played a key role in civic life. The major social and political US reforms since World War II (e.g., the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, women’s, antinuclear and environmental movements) all depended on the idealism, ideas, voices and action of the young. One need not agree with these movements’ goals or outcomes to see that much of the energy that powers civic life in America is generated by our youth.

Second, there are many important policy issues currently facing America that require public attention to be effectively addressed. One need only consider the range of efforts supported by the Trusts--to protect the environment, improve health and human services, create a national dialogue on cultural policy, improve the quality of education, foster the connection between religion and civic life, improve the quality of campaign and elections--to see that a more engaged youth will be essential to public deliberation, citizen participation, and thus private- and public-sector action.

Third, the future of democratic life depends on youth. As discussed later, the habits of citizenship develop early in one’s adult life, and once developed are not easily changed. Today’s disengaged teenagers will become tomorrow’s disengaged and nihilistic citizens, resulting in even greater overall declines in participation. In short, increasing the civic engagement of young adults is critical not only because they are an important segment of the citizenry, but because as they go, so goes democratic life more broadly.

What design strategy do we need to develop to overcome this crisis? What kind of theoretical framework do we need to embrace in order to act upon this wicked problem?

Entry Points

• Current use of networking technology

The record as a reflection of a community

• The record open for everybody
  • participation
  • the problem of speed v/s quality
  • formalization for the public record
• The record as a knowledge model (representation of the world)
  • Epistemological shift (giving it away to computers, or lowering high philosophy into formal computer language)
    • The reflection of the world and the different layers of entities (concrete physical objects, generic objects, classes, concepts, meta concepts, etc.)
  • Visual thinking. The topological relationships between nodes leed to a spatial representation.
    • The initial complexity. (Design approaches)
• Interaction Design for graph grammars

As the amount of information available to everyone increases, it similarly becomes increasingly necessary to seek out "nodes" that gather and filter a subset of all of the available information. We see these nodes take the form of Google News, RSS/feed aggregators, "social book-marking" sites, and blogs that gather/collate in specialized niches.