Developmentalism and the design of societies

A few months ago I read an article titled "The Ideology of Development" by William Easterly, which was published in the July/August 2007 issue of 'Foreign Policy' magazine. The topic of development economics came up again in the book "Poetic Justice" by Martha C. Nussbaum, which I have been reading in recent days. Given this coincidence, I decided to dedicate this post to the role that design thinking can play in economic development. I will focus this posting on the article and I will elaborate on the book in the next posting.

The article corroborated a feeling I had towards my MBA studies in Economics. Even though I personally preferred the subject of Economics over other MBA courses such as Accounting and Finance, my concern is that quite often policy makers make a failed attempt at trying to analyze societies and predict the most fitting policies for a society to develop based on numerical economic models. I will use a couple of statements from the article to elaborate on my point.

The first statements is that "The ideology of Development is not only about having experts design your free market for you; it is about having the experts design a comprehensive, technical plan to solve all the problems of the poor."

It is interesting that the word 'design' was used twice in this statement. Evidently, policy-making is a design exercise. However, the statement also includes other such words as 'experts' and 'technical.' My belief is that a user-centered design approach to thinking and policy-making would yield much better results than the development approach, as it would be specific to the situation and co-designed by the people who will be affected by these policies. With this approach, the expert does not drive the process, but rather contributes to it as necessary. This is the equivalent to asking users to co-design a product that they will use, only to a much larger scale. Economic analysis has a place in understanding a society, the way it operates, and the historical drivers of development or stagnation. But these methods are not too useful in predicting the future development of a society. Instead of predicting the outcomes of a new policy, a user-centered design can contribute a great deal by facilitating the creation of the most suitable policies for a specific society.

The second statement I borrowed from the article is that "like other ideologies, this (developmental) thinking favors collective goals such as national poverty reduction, national economic growth, and the global Millennium Development Goals, over the aspirations of individuals."

This is a tremendous gap in economic study: the fact that individual goals, ambitions and desires are generalized around an artificial framework that advocates the 'greater good.' At the end, the 'greater good' benefits a few powerful people and leaves out the masses in many countries of the underdeveloped world. I will elaborate more on this subject in my next posting, as it deserves to be explored to a larger extent.

Now, readers must be wondering how can designers play a role in the development of societies. According to professor Richard Buchanan, who recently joined the faculty of Weatherhead School of Management, there are four orders of design. The first and second order are the graphic and industrial design traditions of the 20th century, which most of us are familiar with. However, the advancements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have created the opportunity for the role of design to be elevated into two new orders. The third order is systems design, which includes the design of human interactions, organizations, environments and systems. The fourth order is management, which leverages design skills such as abstract thinking, visualization and the ability to see many different approaches to one problem. Drawing the parallel between development and the four orders of design, I see societies as human interactions (third order) and the policies and people who rule them as management (fourth order).

I would like to point out the fact that the writer of the article is a professor of Economics at New York University. Therefore, I don't intend to generalize the way economists think about social behavior and economics. I took a course titled "Managerial Economics and the Multinational Corporation" at Loyola University, and in my opinion the professor was wonderful. She enriched the course by including historical references and stories about real people from the countries that we discussed. However, it was evident that some of the students were comfortable with their 'knowledge' of these countries, which they based on statistics and charts. At the end of the course the professor advised students to live in another country at least once in our lifetime and learn another language. Personally this suggestion was much more significant to me than the many regression analyses I had to run to find out whether capital, labor or another variable is the main driver of economic development in Colombia.