I think there are few people who associate design science with laws and regulations. Yet the two have more in common than you might think. Kees Dorst, in his book Frame Innovation, defines ‘design’ as seeing a situation, being able to imagine how that situation could be improved and then doing that in order to realize that improvement. By extension, ‘design science’ means investigating solutions with the goal of solving a complex problem. So a design scientist examines different solution approaches, creates an artifact or intervention and then tests whether that intervention is effective in actually improving the situation. If you ask me, design science is the finest form of science.
With design in general, and with an artifact or prototype in particular, we quickly think of a physical product. Yet that view is far too narrow. Design is about solving problems and making situations better, and that really doesn’t just happen by designing products. On a societal level, it also happens, for example, through laws and regulations. Every law is an intervention with which you try to get a grip on a social situation and steer it in a desired direction. That is the essence of design.
Group insult
A good example is the ban on group insult, contained in Article 137c of the Penal Code. On the initiative of Minister of Justice Josef van Schaik, this article was added to Dutch criminal law in 1934 with the goal of proactively protecting Jewish citizens. As Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the anti-Semitic threat increased rapidly. As a result, the Dutch government took a number of measures to protect Dutch society from this threat. The ban on group insults was one of those interventions.
Most designs are not timeless. Over time, new technologies are often available or there are societal developments that require different solutions or make existing solutions obsolete. However, many criminal law laws do have a timeless character: stealing, killing or hurting each other is never right, in any zeitgeist and under any technological development. Therefore, the ban on group defamation has also stood for 90 years as a necessary intervention to protect minorities in society. It is salient that some of the parties that will now form the new government in the Netherlands have a special relationship with Article 137c in the Penal Code. For example, it was on the basis of this law that PVV leader Geert Wilder was convicted (without punishment) for his “Less, less” statement, and a group of ten lawyers and jurists, grounded in this law, filed charges last week against BBB MP Mona Keijzer for her insulting Muslims. And it was our current Speaker of the Lower House, PVV member Martin Bosma, who once submitted an initiative bill to remove the very ban on group insult from the Penal Code.
Close to my heart
This issue is close to my heart. As a design scientist, I spend most of my time designing for vulnerable groups. Whether it is the demented elderly or minority groups in Hawaii or the Amazon, I am almost daily concerned with the question of how we can use design science to give the vulnerable, the differently abled, the minorities a central place in our design processes and am therefore a great advocate of inclusive design. In a few weeks in Boston, at the largest design science conference in the world, I will be presenting my work on the pluriverse design paradigm: a design approach in which the power of diversity and the oppressive effect of a universal perspective is the starting point.
Design is not just reserved for designers or scientists. We are all more designers than we think. Through our voting behavior, we influence laws and regulations and thus collectively design the course our society takes. Our voting choices affect so much more than a change in the VAT rate or an adjustment of the personal contribution in health care. By voting, we shape the social interventions that aim to make our society a little better. For me, consistently protecting the minorities and vulnerable in our society is a design principle that is at the top of my list. Always.
