Seeing in Systems: Sketching A Native Ethereum Design Language by Alex Singh (Devcon5)

[Applause] sorry do we have any non designers in the room anyone that doesn't have design ahead time so essentially as saying in systems this talk got really weird I wanted to make them more practical these topics and the subject matter isn't really it's hard to communicate so those it's gonna see when we go that's my clarify something as well when I say native etherion design language I'm not talking about a design system which is the system ization of interface components I'm talking about a generative language in the same way that we have English for something like that how can we create composable generative elements that actually create a design a process of design but they can be adapted to a to a complex system sounds totally normal cool so the situation so basically we invented the internet mid 90s in submit Macmillan century and really shaped it to our world so it's a product about were like to that point and then sort of with the invention of the World Wide Web 1992 berners-lee we arrived at some of the consumer friendly Internet I mean incentivized us to feed in our information I mean in transform from being a space so a destination that you actually visit to being fused with the very sort of information systems about civilization and then obviously everything that happened after 2016 was a catalyst for us thinking and trying to question what's happening with these systems what is happening with the internet how is it how is it reshaping society how is it reshaping a civilization and so my question is my fourth one of these bullets has been essentially aetherium and the related technologies and not so much of an invention of atomic and friends an inevitable emergent expression of the Internet itself with vitally etc as a medium for which this was expressed [Music] another way to think about this is that for the longest time we've had a sort of a simulated reality in the computer and actually which lived but quoting Paul Edwards is an academic that studies and lectures in society and technology studies he says programming can produce strong sensations of power and control because the computer produces an internally consistent if externally incomplete microworld a simulated world entirely within the meat machine itself so that is where most tools produce effects on a wider level in which they are only upon the computer contains its own worlds in miniature in the micro world as in children's make-believe the power of the program is absolute and the problem is that now as the Internet has started to interface with these systems of society the simulated reality of the computer is brittle and it can't handle it is not capable of adapting and responding to the pressures and the challenges that it's now facing and the best way to phrase this I think is in this essay a childhood and they came out on January 1st this year by George Dyson basically says that the genius sometimes deliberate sometimes exit out of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else the models are no longer models the search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge it is human knowledge what began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning and has begun to control rather than simply catalog or index human thought no one is at the controls so this is basically my vibe we live in an age of planetary computing we've reached the limits of design and that there might help us extend them or another way of explaining it how do we get to galaxy brain design all right so just an intermission it was this guy you probably think I'm kind of weird some of these topics are real strange this is me this is a friendlier version of me I'm a product designer consensus I work on the Robo component library about two years I've been researching this topic trying to understand what has been happening since so to 2016 or what are they happening since then and also before that was proceeding this whole this whole event cool so basically yeah what's going on and nobody knows is what I've discovered not even the people in charge this is Casey Newton on Twitter he interviewed a YouTube co-ed Pokemon and she said we work really hard to understand what's happening on it on youtube so the people that run these platforms don't even know what's going on people and well actually this is everywhere so you should all be familiar with this Facebook being used to distribute state propaganda Facebook again being used with site violence and genocide and yanma this one's a bit more positive actually I thought this is fun so basically teens have big bodies in LA they credit in store account all the body and people have to request to follow it if you get in if you get approved it basically means it's your invite they did not design them this is this is this is an interesting one so a DMV says we want to belong anyway I'm sure you're all staying in MDM DS this whole idea of this sort of cloaking anyway so that bus alone and locals say that basically see the service is a pestilence which is very spot and aspirational image they're trying to forget my project effectively saying that Envy is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse you know Katie this is her LinkedIn profile and I think so anything out of the ordinary again anyone know what's up with Katie yes partial credit she is a product of machine learning but what you were not gonna get is that she was also designed by a spy Russian spy and wanted to recruit informants in Washington for LinkedIn and this is also done by the Chinese allegedly as well this is a fun one so hooba grannies in running shoes at delivering ramen food we're right here in Japan and and then how you choose radicalized Brazil so these are two times investigators that went down to Brazil in order to understand what's happening down there and they observe but they believe they've got the evidence they publish this evidence observing that YouTube's recommendation engine led to the rise in popularity of visible Senado and led to his election subsequently so oh yeah this is really something so in this article there's as opposed to by the name of Edward Theodore chief and he says we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like reality is saying is shaped by whatever message goes most viral so we're probably thinking what the hell is going on because no one explicitly designed Facebook to incite violence or YouTube to radicalize Brazilians or Airbnb to reshape affordability in cities all around the world all the Linkedin to be used by recruit informants for foreign intelligence authorities and I think I figured this out I think it's the root cause is the Silicon Valley formulas pretty simple I'm sure you will know it I basically take one young self-assured male white man give him a bunch of cash and they change the world and they impose themselves on the planet to make us better right the issue with this is that is essentially scale it's Silicon Valley's obsession and it's tied to the VC model and the actual the pallid lower returns around how the these BC business ones make their money and if she was scaled inherently is that at least to complexity now complex systems complex systems are those where a system is more than the sum of its parts and effectively the issue here is that we can actually predict their behavior so a complex system is one we count we do we simply cannot map or model all the different interactions all different elements of that system and therefore they producing the emergent effects that I showed you which is exactly the problem emergence is a classical element or classical property or output of any complex system that basically says it's stuff that you cannot possibly have imagined with sort of manifesting from these things oh yeah so essentially one other way to reframe this is the in Malcolm's famous Withers so in a simple system your old design is accepted like five of you this is simple cause and effect right you have a like button and then you it's tied to a counter and it goes up and you feel good about yourself the complex system what happens is that cause might still be tied to effect but then that effect might be tied to other effects as well see if the second and third and fourth order effects that lead to these some of the examples that I showed you earlier in the talk and so yeah the fundamental problem we have here is that we can't fully know all the unintended effects about design choices in a complex system a single cause might have any kind of effect for an example if this is tied to a counter in a simple system I mean it's not a very it's simple it cannot be manipulated to any great degree that new feed if the like button is tied to a recommendation engine that is built by a company that has designed a business model to incentivize time on site in order to sell ad inventory all of those design elements lead to some of the examples I showed you before radicalization of people distributing propaganda and so on and so forth so that are used by actors outside the system in politics and culture etc in ways that were never intended so it is it or read this book and no it's really good okay so yes I'm James Brown oh he's written a bunch of essays around sort of this concept of the new Dark Age and then he published this book that came out of the start of this year maybe the blast but he essentially says what is needed is not new technology but new metaphors a metal language for describing the world and complex systems of reward a new shorthand is required one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of the world in which people politics culture and technology are utterly enmeshed so what I'm proposing if you will is that we need some kind of third layer the 90s in the early 2000s what was around in those days was basically all there was was UI need UI design and that was your thinking and then obviously dawn Norman invented UX in this applied in sort of a computing context in the mid 90s but he didn't find its way into web design as a practice until sort of what 2005 six seven eight so on and basically UX subsumed UI as a cohesive collective practice and my thought is that a third layer is going to subsea wax as well and it's gonna be for the design of complex systems were adapting complex systems so the question is why can we find a new design language and what have really established that it's not a process of creation but revelation we don't need to invent anything new everything that we need is wordy has already been explored has been published of his being talked about and exists in many different disciplines right now today one example of how we can find this process of Revelation facilitated this is John Boyd Air Force pilot this is a happier John Waite he did what it was called the aerial attack State so in the in the mid 20th century it was around the 60s it was believed that dogfighting Aero dogfighting was far too complex to ever be objectively not been defined and that no objective tactics manual would ever be creative he just applied physics to that problem wasn't that hot and be basically determined that in any aerial dogfight the position and velocity of your enemy compared to yourself is all you need to know in order to understand what what the movies they have available and what you can do the Canon of similarly so this is the Yoshizawa angle system up until before they they have system wasn't developed sorry communicating how to make origami was a very complicated process that we just didn't have a system in place that could cohesively or clearly communicate on how to make these phones and so essentially all they did was create a superior symbolic language to better communicate how to go through this process they didn't do anything new they didn't invent anything new that just took what was there and they updated it and incorporated different symbolic similar diagrams from other professions what other disciplines are so how do you design for complexity I've got no idea and that's kind of the point um but I do think we need to go deeper deep it down the stack so to speak and the first thing to consider is that the system should be on primitive so a system is scale free and we're in an age now where scale has evolved these systems or basically incentivizes these systems to grow at a planetary scale a system is scale free it means that it can be as small as a single cell or as large as the universe and systems everywhere you were all familiar with them you each have a system for how you navigate a city or improve your memory or how you value-add a a morning routine have you considered a system and we are very familiar with these with this as a concept as a construct and you're already designing its systems anyway is it the transition here is can we think of less amount out putting objects and outputting relationships knowing that they gonna shape whatever it is that we want to approach so effectively saying that objects as a natural output are a natural output for any set of relationships and interactions that they facilitate moving away from the public solution as a binary and things because if someone presents solution can be another person's problem and understanding that there are no in a simple system maybe there is a meaningful way for a problem solution solution binary to actually work but in these complex systems not so much and also actually the solution implies that a problem can be solved but any solution is actually only temporary this is important as well we design independently we designed as if we're designing a single system but we need to design for interdependence we need to understand how the systems outside of us look unconsciously shaping our design practices and add a bias fees and so on and so forth I think we're really great this is Benjamin Bratt and design theorist I think a really great point of view on this a lot tickle a ssin of this was at a talk he gave last year where he said that he suspected we proposed that the insurance industry has contributed more to car design than the automotive industry itself and this is another really interesting diagram I found one so basically how that these in the in the case of this worker imagine you imagine deal okay how do all of these intellect or systems influence how you design how you practice how you think and this is where it gets interesting so moving away from designing interactions to designing incentives in order to encourage those interactions how can we design modes of value and an opinion believe social reputational status systems how can we design those towards achieving our names I'm happy to move from thinking in non social terms to social terms something that the theory of them does very well is acknowledged able to social relationships and design for them in this consensus mechanism and how do we go from designing the direct control trying to get clear cause and effect what is I have to clear cause and effect to indirect control where it's not understanding that it's not possible for us to have every single answer to every single design social problem but we need to be able to figure out ways to shape influence these things even well after we've actually stepped aside and how do we acknowledge that we now need to design from static systems to adaptive systems and obviously once again aetherium is very good for this with this composability and its capacity to be formed one of the biggest challenges that digital static systems have is sorry is in their inability to adapt so this gives us a model of how we can get around that yeah so also essentially we need to sort of I proposed I suggested this though we should consider consider ourselves effectively on a cycle of creation and adaptation and both the user and ourselves are both going through this cycle as well so just as the user creates and we adapt we create they adapt and think about less from a hierarchical perspective and the set of interrelationships yeah so I don't know how to actually finish this out because this topic is still one that I'm struggling to I might be able to communicate cohesively Oh clearly but this is from LaRoche whilst she says a flower is not a flower it is made only of non-flower elements sunshine clouds time space of minerals godness and so on a true flower contains the whole universe and if we were turn any one of those non-flower elements to its source there will be no flower so just thinking about systems are in and through everything that we're doing [Music] [Applause]