Stories for Designing in Emergency Management
Stories for Designing in Emergency Management
Exploring Distinctions, a Fundament for Developing Sense-Making Stories in Emergency Management and Driving Contextually-Appropriate Design. A NoiseBox Publication.
Introduction
I was delivering my annual talk at the Colorado Emergency Management Conference in February of 2020. At this time, COVID-19 was located in the Pacific Northwest, and there seemed to be a sense of safety given its location. There did not appear to be any perceived imminent threat to Colorado; at least, there was not in the conversations I participated in. The talk I delivered was titled "Design Thinking for the End of the World." It revolved around a few key points, the central of which was that the stories we tell ourselves, our running narrative, are a critical means of making sense of the world and gathering information so that we or someone else may design for it (Snowden, 2008). Typically, I share the design process with emergency managers by componentizing it into two interrelated phases: Crafting a desirable and foreseeable end and acting intentionally to bring it into being. They can be broken down much further, as needed. During this talk, the design process was introduced in three components.
The Problem: What are the contents of the present, and why are they an issue for us?
The Future: (formerly "the solution") How would we like the contents of the present to be different in the future?
The Thing: What will we create, or how will we act to bring about the desired future?
I cannot remember when I initially gave the talk, whether each component was supported by its own story or if each element was placed within a single coherent narrative. In the following, the single coherent story model will be utilized. COVID-19 was a national problem within three days, and Design Thinking for the End of the World was all but forgotten until now when its most basic element of the distinction is explored in a new light.
The following will introduce distinctions as the primary, most basic sense-making process and connect it to storytelling, a more sophisticated sense-making process, even if the story is being spoken internally as the world is experienced through sensorimotor activities. Once things are distinguished, they then become part of stories. The accuracy and number of the things distinguished, the closeness and immersion of the person to the things being distinguished, and the way things are distinguished all matter tremendously. Each of the distinctions just listed and their characteristics will contribute to or, at the very least, influence how the story will be written, such as the increasing vulnerability of a community. While being able to tell and share quality stories increases situational awareness, it also provides a better substrate that originated in the community on which the design process can rest.
Accelerating and Decelerating
There is a need for a slight delay between the change taking place in the world and solidifying it as part of the running story made up of distinctions to be used as a foundation for design. As the elements of the story designers are writing about accelerate, multiply, or become more complex, designers must decelerate their forming of the story, which is vital to creating a valuable narrative. Inserting a delay between the observations a story is about and making them a part of the story is likely to reveal larger-scale patterns and possibilities for intervention, help distinguish between noise/not noise, make sure the wrong events or relationships are not codified, and see what takes shape and settles down before solidifying it and attaching it as a new part of the substrate story for use in the design process. There is much to gain from getting close to or inside a problem and seeing how the complex system it exists in operates. The value of subjective experience is enhanced if it is connected with detached, objective observations. When the world is moving fast, story writers must move slowly to have a broad view, get the bigger picture, and avoid noise or valueless tangents.
The Fundament: A Line Drawn
In the opening, the problem, the future, and the thing were introduced as design components. First was the problem, then the future, and finally, the thing. The trio are empty containers waiting to be filled with stories that can drive the design process forward.
Lines drawn, identified here as distinctions, in one's head or on paper are both defining and compelling. They are also at the heart of this post's handling of developing and sharing stories. Stories contain any number of elements or "things" (not "the thing" written above). The interaction pattern of things, their disposition, qualities, quantities, hazards, form, materials, style, personality, histories, tendencies, goals, strategies, futures, imaginaries, and so on constitute a story and make it worth telling. At the same time, they provide critical and foundational information to design processes. However, how do distinguished things end up in our stories? By the very lines that demarcated them.
A basic distinction is drawn from a motivation and the purpose of achieving a particular value (Marked state). The unmarked state is described by Schultz (2009) as “residual.”
Lines are drawn as the output of the fundamental act of distinction, also known as operations of distinction, the most foundational act in writing one's running narrative or participating in writing the continual narrative of a group. Operations of distinction appear most frequently associated with the work Spencer-Brown's important book Laws of Form, which presents and discusses the notion of a distinction at length and in many different applications (Mingers, 1995; Schultz, 2009; Spencer-Brown, 1973). Laws of form's relationship with mathematics interact with linguistic statements that require "going beneath the level of language to uncover that on which language itself rests" (Mingers, 1995, p.50). Spencer-Brown, like Maturana, finds language not to be exclusively concerned with the description but operational and practical and considers distinctions to be the most fundamental linguistic act that can be performed (Mingers, 1995). The distinctions performed linguistically fall into place within the running story, separated from the other distinctions by what line is drawn and the content. In the original work, a distinction took the form of a shape that, at its most basic, had an inside and outside. The mathematical form-giving distinctions may work their way into the linguistic approach when it comes time to materialize the distinctions made in a running narrative used to make sense of a particular problem in the world so it can be designed for (Schultz, 2009; Spencer-Brown, 1973). It is also conceivable that narrative remains as narrative without taking material form.
Dr. Roger Spencer-Brown
When a distinction is drawn (for example, a line), it cannot be neglected; it has affected the space in which it is written, and we are, as such, “in” the form. The first distinction literally is a first judgment, an Ur-teil, which determines everything coming after it. Once the distinction has been drawn, a “universe” is there, and the gates to return to a state of nothingness are closed (Schultz, 2009, p.161).
Ur-teil can mean judgment, opinion, decree, reasoning, and decision. The distinction has an inside or “marked state.” The outside of the distinction “is a nameless residual, and unmarked leftover, from which the marked side is delineated” (Schultz, 2009, p.161). Mingers (1995) provides another perspective on the first distinction and its impact. Whereas Schultz (2009) takes the perspective of drawing distinctions, Mingers takes the linguistic angle. Critical to constructing a story that serves as the basis for design is recognizing the first distinction made, which sets the stage for every distinction to follow. If the first distinction contains an error, it will be found in all the following distinctions until corrected. Using the same logic, if any distinction contains a mistake during the story’s writing, the narrative will contain an error, resulting in a flawed design process and outcome.
Mingers (1995) explains the drawing of a distinction must be motivated by “some reason (intention or motive) for doing so” (p.51). The operation must produce differences in value between the outside and inside of the distinction for the person who drew it (Mingers, 1995; Schultz, 2009). Things that have been distinguished can be given a name that signifies their value (Mingers, 1995).
Before counting things, we must be able to distinguish between them, and before distinguishing several different things, we must be able to distinguish something. This is the foundation of all language: to be able to create from nothing ( the void)one thing, or state, or space that is distinct” (Mingers, 1995, p.50, bold added).
While Mingers (1995) regards operations of distinction as the most fundamental linguistic act, they do not necessarily need to take place out loud. Whether said silently to oneself out loud or to someone else, distinctions perform the same function, as described by Varela (1979) below.
A distinction splits the world into two parts, 'that' and 'this', or 'environment' and 'system', or 'us' and 'them', etc. One of the most fundamental of all human activities is the making of distinctions. Certainly, it is the most fundamental act of system theory, the very act of defining the system presently of interest, of distinguishing it from its environment (p. 79, bold added).
Mingers (1995) states that distinctions are the most fundamental linguistic act that can be performed. However, it should be remembered that there are also simple ways to materialize distinctions that may support the design process (Spencer-Brown). Recognizing that the linguistic function is part of a more extensive embodied process is essential. The first stage in drawing a distinction is sensing something that can be distinguished. Sensing involves sensorimotor activity and correlations, including touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Once something is sensed, it can be distinguished as the most fundamental linguistic or mathematical act that can occur, though it remains embodied (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, & Barandiaran, 2017; Maturana & Varela, 1987). Something sensed and distinguished does not necessarily need to be present. While walking up a friend's driveway, one might smell meat cooking on a grill. They cannot see it to distinguish the grill from its surroundings properly, but they can distinguish the anticipated presence of a grill they will see later and one actively used in the now. The ability to distinguish things that can be sensed but are not yet visible or having the capacity to distinguish events that will take place at some distant time is vital to being able to begin creating a story about the desirable future a community wants with their participation.
Distinctions can be thought of as slides being quickly added to a carousel. While they remain entangled within sensorimotor activity, inner and outer speech, and their spot in the running narrative, it is helpful to consider distinctions materially beyond their abstract form. While this image arranges them circularly, it is more appropriate to think of them linearly. Slides are a useful mental model for thinking about distinctions: Each slide contains a distinction, a line drawn with a particular motivation and intention that splits things in two and produces value for the individual who drew it on the inside of the distinction and residual on the outside and that which has been distinguished can be given a name (Mingers, 1995; Schultz, 2009).
The concept of granularity is not found in the distinction literature. Varela (1979) uses the example of system and environment as an example of a distinction. This critical distinction provides designing emergency managers with crucial information relevant to the beginning of the design process. With the environment demarcated from the system, an emergency manager can now work inwards to more granular elements. Thought of as slides, each distinction lines up after the primary distinction of system/environment. The contents of each slide then become increasingly granular, moving from the system's emergent properties, constraints, patterns, pathways of interaction, relationships, information, dependencies, and actors in the system, distinguished by primary function (Morin, 1992).
In another context, emergency managers may distinguish an area within their community that has recently become increasingly vulnerable to hazard events. The primary distinction of the community is drawn, and though it may depart from the seminal literature, it will be amorphous rather than a linear line or a perfect circle. Subsequent distinctions seeking a more granular understanding will work from the broad distinction of the community footprint to the finest details, producing a thick stack of slides that can guide designers, who may be the same emergency managers researching the community. While accompanying narrative forms of observation are also valuable, the distinctions represent the observer's experience and how they cut the world up to make meaning relative to the problem through distinctions. It is a world that has been broken into pieces, but not in a reductionist way. It is more of a puzzle made up of the most valued distinguished pieces that are reassembled to form a world that is the basis of design.
The Residual
With each distinction drawn, there is that which is valued inside the distinction and that which is outside the distinction and considered "residual" (Schultz, 2009). The residual may remain in perpetuity as it relates to the design project. Although considered residual and located outside the distinction, it still has the purpose of being the antithesis of the value on the other side. The nonvaluable endows the content of the inside with value. A distinction is drawn that "splits the world into two parts" (Varela, 1979, p.79). The drawing of this scission separates the valuable from what is left over, cutting the world up in two. The state of being residual may be temporary. What has been left on the outside of the distinction may not have been a priority when it was drawn, but it will be later, "We will get to it, just not right now."
Emergency Managers
Emergency managers experience the world through sensorimotor activity (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, & Barandiaran, 2017). A critical, primordial, and unrecognized element of this experience is drawing distinctions that place valences of significance and insignificance over what is sensed along the way (Thompson, 2007). Emergency managers draw distinctions with greater and greater granularity to understand the context they are working in and designing for. All this occurs through the seemingly simple yet universe-giving act of distinction that splits things into two. Drawing distinctions is driven by some motivation, such as learning about a problem that will be used to design a solution. The components of the problem have to be distinguished so they can end up in a story and then a material element that can transmit information to others. Furthermore, through distinctions, things emerge as valuable, meaningful, and significant, creating a world relevant to the problem that emergency managers are trying to solve.
Drawing distinctions is an unavoidable embodied activity. This post seeks to make operations of distinction conscious, intentional, and material and illuminate how distinctions are the bedrock of sense-making. Running narratives are filled with things distinguished as the world is made sense of so it can be designed for. Suppose distinctions become a conscious and intentional act. In that case, emergency managers must continuously look behind themselves at the string of distinctions that got them there and evaluate if they have plotted the right course. With each distinction drawn, the emergency manager establishes where they will travel next in the community. Changes in motivation and the value sought may cause disruptions to the previous stable trajectory. Looking in the other direction, where the emergency manager can go next needs consideration. The path the emergency manager is headed down should be evaluated for its relevance to the task. Beyond understanding where the emergency manager is in the present, how they got there, and where they may be heading, the world being distinguished and brought forth should be evaluated in terms of its use in design.
While this will require further consideration, something may need to be designed to capture these distinctions, the driving motivation and sought-after value, to see how the emergency manager made meaning and constructed a world, such as one where the problem and its interdependencies were the focus. The handing over of the construction of a world on index cards, sketches on paper or on whiteboards, or other mediums such as narratives presents anyone designing with a tremendous amount of information for use as a design substrate. Knowing the driving variables helps to inform the process further. Understanding key variables such as value and motivation may help designers better understand why the emergency managers (who may be designing) brought forth the world they did in the way and why they did.
In whatever form they are given to designers, there will be a degree of narrative, which will be particularly noticeable as the distinctions become granular, moving into greater detail from primary distinctions related to a community's vulnerability, such as "Dire Level of Vulnerability," "Critical Level of Vulnerability," "Severe Level of Vulnerability." Drawing these three distinctions tells a story that the community has three unique values requiring different solutions. It also indicates that there will be three interrelated chapters of the emergency manager's running narrative. The emergency manager could tell the story to the design team, or they could deduce it from whatever materials are handed over. It should be noted that three distinctions are being drawn, as opposed to the normative two that split the world apart. Two distinctions are possible. The community could be distinguished into "Most Vulnerable" and "Slightly Less Vulnerable." There is likely nothing wrong with drawing up to four distinctions, especially if a gradient is necessary, and keeping in mind that these distinctions will be reassembled in the design process.
Significant value is located in an emergency manager being in the community of concern. Through their experience, they are demarcating what is found to be important, valuable, and significant from what is not essential and, therefore, does not need to be designed for. Drawing these distinctions in the community is vital in bringing the community context back to the design process, where it can become foundational. However, the distinctions and the world they create that can be stitched together later are tied to the emergency manager who drew them (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011). The involvement of the emergency manager as the source of the world brought forth may signify a need to involve them in the design process to translate the detailed world they created into artifacts. While it may require much more time and energy, visiting the community and determining what is and is not relevant to the vulnerability problem through coarse to granular distinctions sets designers up for success. Designers are then presented with a distinguished (one might say "observed") version of the world constructed by variables related to the problem they can then solve.
Butchers, Distinctions, and Complexity
Morin (1992) brings materiality and craft to the discussion of distinctions. He contributes uniquely to distinctions through the craft-based profession of butchering. Two butchers with different skill levels are presented. How the two butchers cut the meat in front of them leads to different outcomes. The butchers and their differences can easily be translated to the cutting up of the world performed by operations of distinction.
“The systemic cutting up can be either a clumsy butchering of the phenomenal universe, which will flow out in arbitrary systems, or on the contrary the art of the skillful butcher who cuts up his beef by following the outline of the joints. The systemic sensibility will be like that of the musician's ear which perceives the competitions, symbioses, interferences, overlappings of themes in the same symphonic flow. Where the brutish mind will recognize only one theme surrounded by noise” (Morin, 1992, p.139).
Morin (1992) suggests that the brutish approach to cutting beef results in "arbitrary systems" flowing out. Looking at the definitions for arbitrary, the mathematical one is the most context-appropriate. It indicates that the systems produced by clumsily cutting up the phenomenal universe are of "unspecified value." Carried over to drawing distinctions, if a brutish style is applied to splitting the word in two, all of the desired value at some level of granularity may not be found inside the distinction. The brutish butcher may have unthinkingly and unknowingly put distinctions in places that will bring forth a world that does not make sense. As a result, the value and related information that is wanted will not be available to designers. Alternatively, the distinctions may be taken as accurate, valuable, and used without the awareness that someone acting beyond their scope drew them. Hopefully, the errors will become apparent during the design process, not at the artifact stage.
Like any distinction that will drive design, emergency managers need to consider how they perform operations of distinction and what intentions these acts have toward the future. Even though three levels of vulnerability are observable, will that impose too much extra load on designers devising solutions and those implementing them? Or do three distinctions ensure that each population segment gets the necessary value? Can equality be maintained across three strategies? Unlike the brutish butcher, the skillful butcher cuts up the beef by following the joints. This is informed by a systemic sensibility, which, given a broader reading of Morin's writing, concerns "complex thought."
The skillful butcher informed by systems is compared to a musician who senses and works with the complexity of the symphony, including its multiple themes. In contrast, the less skilled butcher only notices one theme with noise all around it. This is the classic argument for complex thought (some might say systems thinking) over reductionism. While distinguishing things, the skillful emergency manager sees systems and other assemblages and is sensitive to them as they perform operations of distinction. They go to great lengths to locate and trace the boundary or other demarcating features to avoid leaving any variable or amount of value out.
The thing being distinguished by the butcher educated in complex thought may be situated in a complex system inside a relational pattern that gives it significance. When drawing a distinction, the boundary must be broad enough to encompass the other things and relationships that give it meaning. Doing so better informs the design process but may require more attention from emergency managers. The brutish mind may follow a reductionist path and focus on a singular thing without context, annoyed that the thing is surrounded by what their mind perceives as noise.
Conclusion
The study of distinctions can be much more complicated, as it appears in the above, found in Spencer-Brown (1973) regarding wave structure. Though the study of distinctions can become far more complex, for emergency management, it does not need to. Emergency management should revel in the level of simplicity required to add value to practice. It is sufficient for designing emergency managers or those working with designers to focus on the driving motivation, the value they seek through performing the distinction, and what else can be gained from drawing one. Emergency managers must go to the place where sense needs to be made to get context through distinctions. Distinctions appear in the emergency manager’s running narrative as a broader, more coherent means of making sense. The running narrative is filled with the continuous flow of distinctions made through embodied sensorimotor experience tied to linguistic and form-giving capabilities when the world brought forth by distinctions needs to be shared.
Emergency managers need to understand why a line makes a difference, what difference it makes, and the power of the motivation for drawing a line. They must also understand how critical the location of the line drawn is regarding the value achieved, importance, and significance and determine the residual that will not be considered, at least not in this phase of the project.
However simple it may seem, the consequence of a line to emergency management practice cannot be understated, and they are being drawn constantly. The significance of a line that forms a distinction steadily increases as it ends up in a story being actively written and filled with more distinctions. It then becomes the foundation for design processes, embedded in the design outcome, and finally modifies the behavior of those who use it, even if in some small way.
Of course, to move this theory to practice, emergency managers must recognize that distinctions are a primordial act of sense-making that underlies higher-level activities such as stories and designing plans. There will need to be more contemplation and prototyping around recording distinctions and representing them materially as a world. There will need to be a way for people who were not there with the emergency manager experiencing the community context and drawing distinctions to understand it and what action should be taken. The knowledge gained from the initial emergency manager who sought to make sense of the community and its issue of rising vulnerability is invaluable to the design process. They are vital to creating shared images and determining future needs.
References
Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2017). Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal. Oxford, UK: Oxford.
Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2011). From being to doing: The origins of the biology of cognition (2nd ed.). (W. K. Koeck, & A. R. Koeck, Trans.) Kaunas, Lithuania: Carl-Auer.
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge. Boston, MA: New Science Library.
Mingers, J. (1995). Self-producing systems: Implications and applications of autopoiesis. New York, NY: Plenum Publishing.
Morin, E. (1992). Method: toward a study of humankind: the nature of nature (Vol. 1). (B. J.L Roland, Trans.) New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Schultz, M. (2009). Space is the place: The laws of form. In B. Clarke, & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Emergence and embodiment: New essays on second order systems theory (pp. 157-178). Durham, England: Duke University Press.
Snowden, D. (2008). What is Sense-making? Retrieved from http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/what-is-sense-making/
Spencer-Brown, G. (1973). Laws of Form. New York, NY: Bantam.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Varela, F. J. (1979). Principles of biological autonomy. New York, NY: Elsevier North Holland.