Your points in the other thread run quite deep @nolski, thanks, and bear directly on the strategic challenges that meet.coop is facing: as an ‘ethical’ coop, a coop that means to develop multistakeholder governance, and an organisation that provisions digital infrastructure. See commons.hour
I found that what I was writing as a response was getting quite long, and so far I’ve only addressed the first of your four comments, on ‘human centred’ design being quite widely available and practicable. Here’s a link to what I wrote. My main drift as regards human centred design seems to be:
- ‘Human centred design’ has a 50-year history, and that history doesn’t give reason for a whole lot of optimism. Looking at the 70s and the 90s brings some perspective and tempers expectations somewhat.
- The game shifted in quite real ways in the 90s: much more complex now as a ‘design’ reality.
- I find I need to look at a whole history of ‘the professional-managerial class’ in Fordist capitalism, which has been going a looong time now. In its own locations (where its wage-worker members have occupational licence to work) the class seems to have little capacity for real change: it’s a creature of ‘the Fordisms’.
- The hegemonic cultural and economic order has managed to very effectively incorporate PMC members as wage-workers, whose merely ethical and aesthetic values (‘good’ design, ‘better’ specifications, etc) lack muscle - and anyway, they’re easily suckered and distracted by tools and techniques: mere style politics (deckchairs on the Titanic, etc).
- Strategically alternative locations for alternative designing seem to matter - as distinct from altered styles of design in existing locations.
- As a member myself by occupation and training, I’ve felt it necessary all my working life to work in-and-against the professional-managerial class.
It’s pretty grumpy-old-man stuff, and I’m a bit shocked to see how negative I am. But I’ve seen 70s’ and 90s’ ‘human centred’ radicalism absorbed into the mainstream or sidelined, just as previous generations’ tech radicalism has been, and feel a much harder look at the tacit politics is called for, as a ‘professionalist’ politics.