Designing for contested technology
A first note on translation, trust, and the systems we argue about.
Most of what I design sits close to something technical - a system, a material, a process that resists being explained in a sentence. Nuclear energy is the case I keep returning to: a technology argued about for decades, where what people believe rarely tracks what is true, and where the gap between the two is, more than anything, a design problem.
I think the job in those situations is translation. Not simplification - translation. To simplify a contested subject is usually to decide, on someone else’s behalf, what they are allowed to worry about. To translate it is to hand over enough of the real thing that they can form a view they would actually stand behind.
Complexity isn’t the enemy of trust. Hidden complexity is.
That distinction is the spine of the thesis, and of how I try to work. When a design hides the difficult parts of a system to make it feel safe, it borrows trust it hasn’t earned - and the loan is called in the moment something goes wrong. When it shows the difficult parts clearly, it asks more of the person in front of it, and tends to be believed for longer.
This is the first note in what I want to become an ongoing record: the thinking behind the work, the questions the thesis is circling, and what I learn from building with code and AI as design materials rather than as subjects to design about.
More soon. - Court