For more identity, not less
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Brexit, Politics, Identity, Service Design, Strategic Design

Both/and

Practically speaking, and before Brexit and Trump, the re-emergence of meaningful public sector innovation, and the related, broader ideas of the ‘entrepreneurial state’, had already begun to open up a richer set of possibilities for governance. The ability of service design, powered by digital, to streamline, reorient and turbocharge government services provides a rare opportunity to think through what government is. Europe is well-placed to lead on this, as indicated by Estonia’s approach which, being state-led, is more constructive than Silicon Valley’s, or President Trump’s, ‘move fast and break things’ end-game.

But care should be taken even here, and the rush to digitise everything is perhaps not being considered holistically enough. For example, e-Estonia’s Siret Schutting has said:

When it’s like minus 40 outside and you have a newborn baby, you probably don’t want to go to the family office to name her: you do that online. (These are) very small, pragmatic things.

Although babies are also small things, I think that registering their name is not, and we might argue that there is a certain set of transactions that have ceremony embedded in them, with a different order of meaning, and thus warrant a physical, face-to-face interaction. Naming your child is not like opening a bank account, booking a flight or ordering on Amazon Prime.

A more holistic service design approach would see the value in these physical touchpoints, and find a productive synthesis which augments them with digital experiences. Digital forces a focus on the physical, if you do it properly, raising important and compelling questions about the correct place of both—and both digital and physical are always engaged. Similarly, we should be on our guard with anyone promoting data-driven government, just as with data-driven cities: a government is not a computer, just as a city isn’t.

Still. This too could be resolved with good design (and other) leadership, capable of incorporating the value of digital services and decision-making augmented by data, yet within a more holistic view. At least the desire to positively reinvent, in line with today’s shifting contexts, is there.

While its fabric could be more refined, Estonia’s e-Residency programme is a fascinating statement about 21st century citizenship. (To the extent that it can be parodied as CountryOS in an April Fool’s joke.) Although it is predicated solely on business exchange, rather than something more meaningful, it nonetheless is highly suggestive. It asks how we might able to think more richly of ‘both/and’ in terms of identity, of being part of nations, cities and the world. This implies respect for, and understanding of, both the local and the global.

What true value, in fact, is to be gained from limiting a sense of identity? Of course being part of a nation means more than collecting stamps in a passport, as if checking in on Facebook or tallying frequent flyer points. Just as democratic decision-making should also mean more than the Brexit referendum, which was effectively a nationwide Facebook Like button on an undefined idea of Britain in Europe.

Yet truly respecting national identity, and urban identity, and shared landscapes, as well as the global cultures of my children is entirely possible. Indeed, I’d argue this is the way the world works, and has done for centuries. An ongoing denial of that will thus prove to be counterproductive at best, and hurry along the horrors depicted by Curtis in Hypernormalisation at worst.

It escapes the limited imagination of British ministers, prime or otherwise, that we might approach this as a design challenge. This would mean asking the right questions, 90% of the challenge right there, before articulating how multi-layered identity systems might work. In doing so, that would also mean articulating decision-making systems that might actually reflect today’s and tomorrow’s realities, rather than yesterday’s.

Any such endeavour would need to be multiple perspectives, beyond design. Yet design has a role to play, due to its facility with integrative and participative practices, synthesis as well as analysis, balancing objective and subjective meaning. Design can bind analysis to symbolism, and thus emotion. In fact, it is one of the few professional disciples to deal directly in emotion and identity, something else that Jessica Helfand’s book makes clear.

Ian Warren, an election data advisor to political campaigns, writes a compelling piece noting that these recent elections — and no doubt our forthcoming ones in Netherlands, France and Germany — were “much less about what people are (demographics, data) and more about what they feel (anger, disillusion etc.) The latter are at least, if not more, important influencers in determining how people vote in my opinion.” He describes how the Leave campaign’s theme of ‘Take Back Control’, and their now infamous, and entirely misleading, poster of a long line of migrants queuing to get into Britain — and how the Remain campaign had little in response:

What the Remain campaign missed, and what data and polling often misses, is how people think and feel … they still regale the audience with facts (apparently clear facts!) whilst Farage waves a passport. (Ian Warren)

Will Wiles has handily catalogued the way that much of the populist discussion around the referendum played out via the “material pressure points of identity.” In other words, a spluttering Nigel Farage angrily waving that passport at us. We might later add Donald Trump’s wall — racism made manifest in infrastructure. Though predictable misdirections, they are highly potent nonetheless.

Wiles described how the Leave campaign’s case was “strongly emotional, brandishing these totems of identity that they believe have either been defiled or threatened by the European ‘superstate’.” He also reveals how little of that was true, pointing at the EU’s handy list of Euromyths. Either way, Remain had nothing in response.

Yet Estonia’s little blue plastic card, USB reader, slightly clunky web services and humble little embassy gives us something, actually, no matter how small it may seem in the context of such shattering decisions. As Wiles says, “the look of the world, the way it feels and performs, is important … the way this part of the debate has played out stresses the vital importance of thoughtful, distinctive design.” Wiles notes that the ephemera of the EU is indeed rendered in what we might call Neuter Bland, betraying its committee-led design process and the sheer lack of engagement with design — as compared to OMA’s flag proposal, a brilliant, jittering barcode of multiple adjacent identities.